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Copyright N^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



(t^c Jb^de anb tfje Jtgee 



\->L ;a IJaluatton of Cennp-- 
0on'0 3JD?>U0 of tliie mtng a 

<B{ucibateb in patt 6p Compavmne Betvceen 
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Itfiomw 2. Croweff anb Companf 



Copyright, 1907, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 
Published September, 1907 



[cdH^k^^ of congress] 
two Uoolts Ht;s«ivad f 

AUG 18 I90f 

CoDvnrht Entry 

oust,* A 'aXc, N6. 

COPY U. 






Composition and electrotype plates by 
D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston 



3ectione of t^e 16ook 

I. spiritual Dynamic in the Age's Poetry 3 

II. Complementary Arcs in the Life Orbit: Ten- 
nyson and Browning 13 

III. Idylls and Finished Epic Cycle 26 

IV. A Poetically Realized Philosophy 30 
V. The Ultimate Goal of Tennyson's Study 38 

VI. Roots in Personal Experience 43 

VII. Evolutionary Stages in the Epic Theme 54 

VIII. Assessment of Residual Values 73 



ptcfacc 

# /^ 1 ^ HE primary aim of the ensuing pages 
■ J is neither eulogy nor criticism, but 
X^-A^ what Walter Pater has taught us to 
call appreciation; that is, a disinterested en- 
deavor in sympathetic and constructive spirit to 
answer the question how the Idylls look to-day, 
after twenty-one years' life in the completed 
form of an epic cycle has given time, and the 
detachment that comes with time, the warrant 
so to separate their large and permanent val- 
ues from their initial glamours that they may 
come into whatever matured rights are their 
due, 

"And orb into the perfect star 
We saw not, when we moved therein." 

In committing this study to writing, I have 
availed myself of an occasion, to fulfil a virtual 
promise of long standing. 
The occasion was a request from the Brown- 
ing Society of Boston, whose programme for 
the winter of 1906-7 was " Browning among the 
Poets: a Year of Contrasts and Comparisons," 
to read them a paper on Tennyson ; which I ac- 
cordingly did, on December 18, 1906. This will 
in part explain why so much of the valuation 
of Tennyson is carried on by way of comparison 
with his brother-poet ; a procedure which, so far 
from confusing the inquiry, proved, once em- 
barked upon, to be perhaps the most lucid and 
fundamental approach to my specific theme. It 

vii 



iDrefacc gives, further, good opportunity to note how re- 
markably these two great contemporaries of 
the nineteenth century divide the dominating 
movements of the manhood spirit between 
them. 

The promise, made to the present Lord 
Tennyson in the year after the poet died, has 
remained all this time more or less in medita- 
tion but unfulfilled; partly on account of other 
intervening duties, and partly because, with 
me, time and its tempering insights seemed 
necessary to bring that just view and propor- 
tion of things which a poem that had been in- 
timately enmeshed with my youthful enthusi- 
asms demanded. 

"Wait : my faith is large in Time, 
And that which shapes it to some perfect end," 

wrote Tennyson of one of his searching expe- 
riences. It behooved the student of his most 
cherished work to wait until he could write for 
a generation to whom Tennyson's captivating 
poetry had not been a daily education. For the 
rest, the judgment is now in the hands of my 
readers. 



Amherst, Massachusetts, 
January 27, 1907 



(^fje 35f ff6 anb t^e JT^ee 



(€^e3l dpffe anb t(ie j( gee 

t 

^pkitmt O^namic in t^e JJ^c'e poctt^ 

HMONG the unseen powers that 
watch over the spiritual ongoings of 
the time, whether subtle phases of 
natural selection or of the divinity that shapes 
our ends comes to much the same thing, we 
must not fail to reckon that apportioning over- 
sight which so adjusts a poet's style to his mes- 
sage that the latter acquires on the whole just 
about the welcome and momentum it ought to 
have. A message implies a mission ; and of this 
every earnest poet is aware. By the very fact 
that he sees so clearly and feels so deeply he 
is the conscious vehicle of a propaganda; to 
him it is all-momentous that others should see 
and feel as he does. How far then, we his read- 
ers respond, ought his propaganda to prevail? 
How much of the opulent and crowded life of 
man should his particular pulsation of truth 
draw into its orbit? The answer to this ques- 
tion we may read pretty accurately, if we have 
insight, in the inexorable terms of his style; 
which like a monitory muse has whispered to 
him, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no far- 
ther." 

To test the truth of this, take for instance 
Walt Whitman, who as a child of Adam to 



JT^ee 



(l£(jc JIbvKe whom there is no differentiation of parts comely 
anb tBe ^^ uncomely, so insistently sings himself. How 

much of that amorphous elemental self of his, 
as it were the raw material of personality, 
does a civilized world need to assimilate? We 
open his book, and essaying to read find his 
style as unorganized as his message, and we 
get his range and trend as well from a speci- 
men as from the whole; so after noting the 
drift of his melody most readers are content to 
leave him singing; coming back occasionally, 
perhaps, to see how things are getting on, as 
he leans and loafs at his ease, observing a 
spear of summer grass. They get in that way 
about all of the primordial self and of the av- 
erage democratic man that they have practical 
use for. Take again George Meredith, with his 
cryptic note of an all-subduing naturalism, as it 
were the poetic circulation of evolutionary po- 
tencies through the veins of personality. Surely, 
it would seem, we ought to heed this mystic 
deduction of science and enrich our vision of 
life thereby. And we do, — as far as his words 
and images, so crowded with laborious involve- 
ment, will let us. But the tension of mind 
needed to keep along with him has its fated 
limits, and its assimilating vigor runs out just 
about where the momentousness of his propa- 
ganda does. Take once more Swinburne, whose 
song of native freedom, colossal in mature im- 
port yet in his spirit all too unmotived, is well- 
nigh lost, by the time it reaches our heart and 
will, in a deliquescence of verbal music. While 
we are trying to keep in tune with the elabo- 
4 



rate fugal melody, the untamed freedom has f^^e 3l5pff0 
somehow become tamed and diffused, and the ^^^ ^a^ 
message has wrought its intrinsic net result qt^^^! 
of applied energy. So it turns out to be, as mat- *^»^^ 
ter of cold fact, with poet and prophet alike, 
as they court the suffrage of their fit audience. 
Of each, in his individual stroke, the age whom 
he would evangelize can say, as Tennyson 
said of the sharp impact of sorrow on his be- 
reaved heart : 

"Likewise the imaginative woe, 

That loved to handle spiritual strife, 

Diffused the shock thro' all my life, ^n iDemoriam 

But in the present broke the blow." IpPPV* 1* 

In every poet's style there seems to be a tem- 
pering element, not so much to cause a shrink- 
age of effect as to break the immediate blow 
of his message and diffuse the shock through 
the common life of the age so that it will work 
not singly but in fit equilibrium with the count- 
less other impulses to which it is subject. 
The examples I have given must perhaps 
submit to be minor and sporadic. The net re- 
siduum to which each reduces, as compared 
with what a full-furnished age needs, will suf- 
ficiently indicate why this is so. A more widely 
operative example, and more cardinal, may be 
adduced : the example of the two dominating 
poets who, singing side by side through so 
many growing years of the last century, set the 
prevailing pace of poetic utterance and appre- 
ciation. What would have been the vital dyna- 
mic in the age, I found myself asking the other 
day, if Browning's robust and audacious mes- 



/C6e 3lbv(C6 ^^S^ h^^ been conveyed in Tennyson's wizard 
anb tSe artistry ; what, if Tennyson, for his more guard- 

rj^ ^ ed and cautious propaganda, had borrowed 

*^»^^ Browning's raucous voice? An unthinkable al- 

ternative this, of course, given the fact that the 
style is the man ; but for once let us essay to 
think the unthinkable, and uncover the heart 
of the two brother poets in a new idiom. 

Here, on the one hand, sings a bard who in 
virtual aim is the vigorous advocate of sheer 
headlong aggressiveness. In effect Browning 
will deny to manhood no native proclivity or 
passion ; his final ideal is to conduct the impe- 
rious human spirit through all the deeps and 
sloughs of life until at the end it reaches 

"the ultimate, angels' law, 
S JDcatl? in tl?e Indulging every instinct of the soul 

jDc0crt, 631 There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing." 

To one who, like Hamlet, sees "his naked 
spirit how majestical," such is the culmination 
of things. In pursuance of this ideal Browning 
fears not to trust all feeling equally; hearing 
all sides; rejecting nothing in the tremendous 
gamut of souls, from Caliban and Sludge and 
Blougram and Guido Franceschini, with all 
the dirt of animality or perverted motive that 
clings to them, up to the saintly Pope, at the 
height of long-ripened wisdom, and David, at 
the summit of the prophetic insight of love, and 
Abt Vogler, at the mystic point where the emu- 
lous heaven yearns down to claim shares in his 
art, and the dying St. John, at the ethereal 
table-land of intuitive spiritual values. Every- 
thing discernible in the sum-total of manhood 
6 



JlQce 



must have its due, a proportioned due of up- (^(jc 3lbiftt6 
building, furnishing, reaction, probation. So f^^^ ^a^ 
momentous is each element, positive or nega- 
tive, that evil almost disappears, as it were a 
thing of nought or silence implying sound. 
Nay, even the lowest depth of ruin is boldly 
faithed as 

"that sad obscure sequestered state 
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul ^'?«^ '^^^S »"<* ^^« 

He else made first in vain. " ^ook, ;:. 2 1 2 3 

How shall a halting dim-seeing age be edu- 
cated to bear such an audacious, not to say 
perilous, exposition of life? 
Here, on the other hand, occupying his com- 
partment of the same English mind, sings the 
brother poet whose music moves equably and 
tunefully in the bounds of law and custom; 
whose constant pressure is on the restraining 
brakes of prescription, order, proportion, tem- 
pered reflection; whose congenial region, of 
spirit as well as of politics, is a land 

*' Where Freedom slowly broadens down 
From precedent to precedent. " ^ou Sek i»c Wl?r 

If the sweet tenor of his song is broken, as it 
indeed sometimes is, rising almost to the shriek 
of hysterical discord, it is only at his sense of 
the age's effrontery of evil. So sensitive is he to 
every lawless breath that to his ideal it would 
seem that primal instinct and proclivity merit 
scarce any free play at all, and the elemental 
man is metamorphosed into the cultivated and 
conventional man. On every side of his mes- 
sage one gets a prevailing impression of checks 



(^6e '^IbDfftf ^^^ balances, subtle elements of caution, re- 

N f A gulation, solicitude, sane and sober repression. 

(j^o tlje j^ needed curb this, doubtless, for a too head- 

^S^^ strong age; but how shall it be made viable 

and pervasive where it is most needed? 

What now, reverting to our question, would 

have been the effect of the reversed conditions, 

style and message? 

With the endowment of that permeating 
charm, that captivating music, which made 
Tennyson *' England's voice for half a cen- 
tury," would not Browning have been too peril- 
ously armed? Would he not have been a subtler 
Lord Byron, not sowing lawlessness broadcast, 
indeed, like his predecessor, but far more in- 
sidiously honeycombing the nation's too ready 
heart with a kind of anarchic insolence? Tenny- 
son, on his side, wielding Browning's blunter 
and less gracious weapons, would have made 
little headway in making his cautious spirit 
prevail. He would perhaps have been as dull as 
a pedant, or as hard and unbenignant as a 
scold. The too obvious truisms of law and order, 
the uninspiring levels of conventional morals 
and sentiment, are not kept vital in that way. 
As the matter actually stands, however, the 
divinity that shapes a generation's ends has 
looked out for the fitting adjustment of things. 
And we can trace this adjustment, in appreci- 
able degree, to a thing so simple as the strain 
of poetic style, with its fated reaction on the 
reader. Browning, the common minds say, is 
hard reading; hard, but as we dwell with him, 
abundantly rewarding and stimulating. We 
8 



must work for what we get. He is not a poet of (J^fjc 3f6vff0 
the sofaor the hammock. And in the end our in- ^^^ ^g^ 
tellectual energies, laboring with him, are and n^ ^ 
have to be so sharpened, and at the same time ^^^^ 
so justly tempered as to accord his message 
the meet and balanced reaction. We can safely 
indulge the spiritual instincts he has at heart, 
instincts no longer headlong and heedless, by 
the time they have passed through such a cru- 
cible of athletic cerebration. By that time too, 
it must be owned, though we have no call to be 
Pharisaic over it, we become aware that we are 
not of the many who are swayed by the popu- 
lar ideas that lie around loose, but of the limited 
number of those who can bear such heroic regi- 
men ; can say of our mere esoteric revelation, 
with Abt Vogler: 

** But God hasf a few of us whom he whispers in the ear ; 
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians 
know." nbt iocQ\cr,%i 

That this is as it should be need not set us up; 
it is merely recognizing, with humble joy in our 
election, that the more emancipated spiritual 
impulse can prosper duly only in trusty reposi- 
tories, where its energies are in proportioned 
equilibrium. 

Nor are we the elect absolved from the claims 
of our kind. From the height of our relatively 
freer vision we must needs look abroad on the 
great social welter of those whose uneasy ten- 
dencies, identical at bottom with ours, must yet 
be held in with bit and bridle. And here again 
we see how truly, on the whole, the age has got 
its needed leading. "England's voice," we dare 

9 



/C^C 3lbv(C6 to say, was a divinely ordained one. Tennyson, 
anb tSc appeasing the meditative reader by poetic fra- 

^Tj. grance, rhythm, imagery, music, or, not less po- 

^»^^ tently, entering his ready memory by a wealth 

of finished inevitable phrase, makes him move 
obedientlythrough a finely ordered poetic world 
as it were in the natural way of living; so that 
almost without conscious reaction his mind is 
impregnated, like the Lotos Eaters, with an 
atmosphere of rich and normal life, wherein the 
conventions of law, social refinement, religion, 
wise enterprise, are all in place, a matter of 
course. Ordained leaders and devisers are there, 
Arthurs and Merlins, at the centre of things ; a 
kind of Round Table realm like the idealized 
springtide season of Gareth and Lynette: 

:6arct]? and "And all about a healthful people stept 

iTfncttc, 308 As in the presence of a gracious king." 

A tranquil afternoon radiance this, with lan- 
guage almost overladen with dreamy beauty to 
support it ; tame and subdued indeed by theside 
of Browning's trenchant dialectics. But how 
otherwise, we ask, could the heart of a gener- 
ation that hates to think be drawn in such wise 
as to accept the steady pressure of civic and 
social order? —and the answer is not easy. The 
many must be taught as though you taught 
them not; must be gently imbued with a spirit 
that becomes a pervasive sentiment, an encom- 
passing tone and atmosphere of public opinion. 
It is not by being set to meaty difficult cere- 
bration, or by the stimulus of daring reaction, 
that the great middle class is held to the steady 
norms of corporate life. 

10 



There is no need to quarrel, then, with the (^(fc 3lbf((6 
dispensation of things as they are. No call to ^^^ ^a^ 
make our poets and prophets over, or distri- jt^^J 
bute their audiences differently. Each wields ^"^^ 
the style that is the man, and each finds in his 
readers the personal and idealistic chord that 
vibrates to his. We value more highly, perhaps, 
what we get at greater cost of work ; it intro- 
duces us to amore vigorousand venturousstra- 
tum of life. But this may be partly because it is 
in us to venture and men like Browning have 
challenged us; and just as truly it may be be- 
cause we have surmounted the paralyzing 
wave of timid doubt and are ready to accept the 
challenge. Browning had to create his select 
audience, singing meanwhile for the future. 
Tennyson found his large one more nearly to 
his hand, and the future that he foresaw must 
tarry to adjust theuntowardnesses of the pres- 
ent. It would be a mistake to conclude, how- 
ever, that Tennyson's cherished life values be- 
long therefore to a day that is past. They may 
suffer temporary dimness and slight, or be 
unheeded like the music of the spheres, but 
they are as permanent as Browning's, as per- 
manent as human nature. For there is a stra- 
tum of life, vital in all of us, in which if we would 
go on consistently to things as they ought to 
be we must bow to things as they are ; a stra- 
tum underlying the level of high mettle and ag- 
gressiveness ; in which even while we muse and 
dream we may still be steady and loyal, and in 
which the felt law of being is not a hard-earned 
prize but an age's form and pressure. It was 

II 



(^Sc 3lbv(f6 ^^^ integrity of this stratum that Tennyson had 
atib tdc ^^ heart ; in this that he essayed to do his era a 

r^ ^ service. It required consummate art, and all the 

•^^^^ enticing amenities of poetic grace, to do it in 

fitting wisdom of power and make it prevail. 



12 



tt 

Compfementarp Jfrce in t^c Cife Ot6it: 

(Ecnnpon anb TBtoyQuin^ 

N thus endeavoring to define the dy- 
namic distinction between Tennyson and 
Browning I have very nearly reached the heart 
of my specific theme. One more comparison of 
the two poets, however, or rather a projection 
of this one, falls to be considered here, as a fur- 
ther step of approach. 
Browning, as our remarks about him have not 
obscurely implied, is the poet of the individual 
initiative. To him the human soul is a soul ac- 
tive, full of vital energy, made or marred, but 
also alone salvable, by its own free impulse. To 
Tennyson's more apprehensive feeling, on the 
other hand, the soul is also a thing acted upon, 
not indeed in such wise as to be helplessly 
swayed and passive, but as subject to the onset 
of powers good arid evil, with which at every 
step it must reckon, and on which its ordained 
business is to react. While therefore Brown- 
ing, splendidly self-centred, presents to the 
universe a dauntless front before which life is 
a triumph of individuality and evils are only an 
occasion, Tennyson moves cautiously, sensi- 
tively, in the felt presence of those _ , 

" High instincts before which our mortal Nature 5ntimation0 of 

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised," 3mmorralitf 

and cannot shake himself free from them until 

13 



anb t^e 



Epilogue to 
Pramati0 per// 
0onx 



Epilogue to 
pramati0 "Per// 
oonx 



they are resolved. With him, as with Words- 
worth, "a wise passivity" no less than a ven- 
turesome aggressiveness must have its perfect 
work. There are things in life to fear as well as 
things to defy. 

The way of the two poets to their unspoken 
ideal corresponds accurately to these opposite 
feelings in presence of their universe. Brown- 
ing's way, the way of the energizing individual, 
is not so much an overcoming as a taking un- 
disputed possession of one's unique personal- 
ity ; and along with this goes a pervading sense 
of how momentous are the peculiar traits of 
every humblest or oddest human creature. 
With the individual inheres the potent fact of 
differentiation. For the working out of his life- 
problem, accordingly. Browning's constant me- 
thod is to 

"Take the least man of all mankind, as I ; 
Look at his head and heart, find how and why 
He differs from his fellows utterly" ; 

and this method leads him with unflagging zest 
into the most out-of-the-way corners of history 
and personality, to find as it were rare speci- 
mens and strange combinations. Yet with all 
this accentuation of differences his aim is uni- 
tary, after all ; for his ever-present endeavor is 
to follow each case upward until in some unique 
manifestation it has illustrated 

"How heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine." 

Nothing is more inveterately characteristic of 
Browning than this constant quest; and so 



14 



sure is he of its success, as a working formula, fj^a^ 3lb^{(e 
that absolutely all is grist that comes to his mill. L .g ^ 
In pursuance of it he figures this "heaven's J; " 
high" always as a vital power coming down *^Q^^ 
from the unseen places to meet each man at the 
individual point where he is most himself, and 
thus by combination making a unique product. 
This is well illustrated by the way the emu- 
lous heaven yearns down to supplement Abt 
Vogler's musical improvisation by the super- 
earthly touch of genius. Hence Browning is 
the poet not only of the masterful individual 
but of the supreme moment in every man's life 
when for once and all the soul joins forces with 
the over-soul, the life of its life. There is a de- 
termining moment in every life, wherein the 
whole personality is concentrated, a moment 

"When eternity affirms the conception of an hour" ; abt toogler, p 
and therefore the ideal attitude of man, as time 
and aspiration wear the thickness thin, is, like 
the aged St. John, to 

♦' Lie bare to the universal prick of light," ® ^^*^^ '" ^^* 

every pore open, as it were, to the supplement- 
ing divine. Thus Browning completes his indi- 
vidual from the divine side, which is as in- 
tensely active as the human, and forms com- 
binations as various as are individual bents and 
wills. 

Tennyson, too, has supremely at heart this 
same union of human and divine. But his ap- 
proach to this ideal is more by a kind of dead- 
lift from the human side; not a taking sove- 
reign possession, as of creative right, but an ar- 

15 



me 3bym 
anb t^t 



0i)ctf £ear« 
after 



duous and progressive overcoming, by steps 
and stages, and with many a slip and peril, 
until at last the soul stands, or rather falls well- 
nigh forspent, on the high threshold of the 
House of Life. Hence the greater doubt and 
uncertainty that attends the whole process ; the 
uncertainty inherent in the passive openness of 
the soul to untoward influences. The self-same 
goal of life is there ; but the man must fight for 
it, and ceaselessly guard his flanks, and guard 
every inch of gain. This is how Tennyson views 
the soul's plight, thus acted upon : 

♦'Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with 
the game : 
Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see 
nor name, 

"Felt within us as ourselves, the Powers of Good, the 
Powers of 111, 
Strewing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of 
the Will." 

Another point of differentiation from Brown- 
ing it is essential to note : the fact that all this 
is not so much an individual achievement, 
wherein each man's uniqueness is the salient 
trait, as the growth and uprise of the human 
type, wherein each man acts only as he is work- 
ing at one with all humanity. Tennyson is 
keenly aware of the subtle tendrils and tenta- 
cles that connect man with man ; the powers 
good and ill that act upon him belong to the 
vital working-order of a unitary manhood, a 
society. Tennyson's realization of this con- 
stantly conditions his poetic thought ; we see 
it worked out, for instance, in his early poem 
i6 



JTcree 



The Palace of Art. In the most poignant hours (^^^ 3f6pff6 
of his personal sorrow, too, his most individual ^^^ ^a^ 
depths of experience, he still takes the age and 
the race into his partnership, bent on gaining 
some access of strength which shall be as 
available for all as for one : 

••The high Muse answer'd: •Wherefore grieve 
Thy brethren with a fruitless tear ? 

Abide a little longer here, 3n iDcmoriam 

And thou Shalt take a nobler leave.'" Iviii % 

In all this contrast of moods and methods, as 
we see, the difference of Tennyson from Brown- 
ing is not the difference of relative incisiveness 
or bold insight, but quite accurately the differ- 
ence due to their occupying supplemental arcs 
of the same orbit. It well-nigh excites our won- 
der at the provision made for the age's sym- 
metrical upbuilding to note how truly the two 
brother-poets answer to and complete each 
other, supplying each the other's lack. Tenny- 
son is more deeply involved in the large evo- 
lutionary consciousness which was rising in 
the heart of his scientific day. Rather than rise 
to the individual height alone he will take his 
species with him ; he is, as a poet-philosopher, 
traversing the dim and perilous way by which 
manhood is being made. He cannot therefore 
surrender himself to an intrepid optimism ; it 
is neither in his temperament nor his theme to 
do so. It is comparatively easy to be optimistic 
when you follow the potencies of an individual 
ideal, in unique genius or skill or wisdom or 
saintliness ; but when you must encounter the 
clashing elements of society, the discordant 

17 



JiQce 



(^tfc 3lb^(($ ainis and motives, the insidious allurements, 
V ^o the malarious air, the vagaries of blood and 

^ custom, your course is dimmed as it were by 

the smoke of battle and the fogs of baser in- 
stinct ; and with the Preacher of old you have 
to acknowledge doubtfully that "God made 
man upright, but they have sought out many 
inventions." 

We cannot spare either of our poets, then, af- 
ter all, if we would have the whole manhood 
field, social as well as individual, before us ; if 
instead of the broken arcs of the large orbit of 
life we would have the perfect round. 

One great focus of study there is, in which the 
two poets come royally into harmony. From the 
restless meditations of each there detached it- 
self early in his career one supreme dominating 
Figure, the figure of the full-orbed, full-fur- 
nished man. Neither could well come to rest, 
with the wealth of elements that he had at heart, 
until he had thus enclosed them in concrete 
form. And each builds his concept in a way 
strikingly determined by his early and inherited 
relations. 

Browning, as becomes akind of amateur theo- 
logian not of the establishment or university, 
identifies his ideal man squarely and unequi- 
vocally with the historic Christ; this is as it were 
his synthesis, his discovery, from his independ- 
ent data. Toward the revealed Christ he sees 
all roads of pure aspiration leading. To him 
he sets the minstrel David looking forward 
through the ages, and from the self-sacrificing 

i8 



summit of his own brother-love prophesying: f^^lffc 3bv(C6 
Christ as divinely crowning the love of which ^^^ ^a^ 
man is capable: IXtttJ 

**'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, 
that I seek 
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me. 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this 

hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 
Christ stand!" 0aul, 308 

He sets the heathen poet Cleon in despair long- 
ingforsome embodiment of the all-round Greek 
type of human perfection; and not obscurely 
hints in the end that, if he only were aware, the 
fulfilment of his longing is at the very moment 
being preached in his isle by a Jew named 
Paulus, whose doctrine, he thinks, "could be 
held by no sane man." He sets the dying St. 
John looking back to Jesus across two thirds 
of a century and applying to his person the in- 
tuitive insight of the Johannine writings: 

" I saw the power ; I see the Love, once weak. 
Resume the Power : and in this word 'I see,' 
Lo, there is recognized the Spirit of both 

That moving o'er the spirit of man, unblinds a pcatl? in tl?c 

His eye and bids him look." pc«crt, 221 

He sets the sceptical Arab physician Karshish, 
with the scientific sense supposably contempo- 
rary with Christ, explaining away the fact of 
Lazarus' alleged resurrection from the tomb, 
but in spite of himself deducing the luminous 
solution of the world's mystery if only the thing 
were so: 



19 



anb tffc 



£pi0tle of 



a ©catl? In tl?c 
©cecrt, 474 



£t>ilo0ue to 
?Dramat<6 "Ptrii 
Bonx 



*'The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
So, the All-Great, were the All- Loving too — 
So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here I 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love. 
And thou must love me who have died for thee ! " 

Nor does he hesitate to identify this Christ fig- 
ure with God. The fervor with which he puts 
this confession into the mouth of St. John is 
not merely dramatic; there is enough of the 
same strain in his other poetry to warrant us 
in calling it his own personal conviction : 

**I say, the acknowledgement of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it. 
And has so far advanced thee to be wise." 

Nay, when, in the Epilogue to Dramatis Per- 
sonam, he speaks in his own person, after hav- 
ing sounded the minds of David and Renan, to 
give supreme answer to the question "how 
heaven's high with earth's low should inter- 
twine," his conclusion, drawn from data of pure 
individualism, is: 

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose. 
Become my universe that feels and knows." 

In this, independent as was his approach to it, 
we cannot attribute to him any essential break 
with the acceptedChristology of the evangelical 
creed. He has thought out the problem for him- 
self, and arrived at the orthodox conclusion. 
For the rest, however, he does not reproduce 
or coordinate details of the historic Person- 



20 



age's life, nor in all the range of his portrayals (ICtje 3lb^iC6 
does he essay to create a personage of his own ^j^^ ^R^ 
which in any comprehensive degree embodies TTyj-^g 
the large fulness of Christlike manhood. That ^ 
is not his way. Rather, he portrays individual 
fragments of the idea, as it were, not the drama 
with its mighty Protagonist but the ** Drama- 
tis Personae," with their varied bents and pow- 
ers: a David, a Pope Innocent, a Caponsacchi, 
a Pompilia; nor shunning the while to find re- 
deeming traits in many a figure of less heroic 
mould, a Paracelsus, a Era Lippo Lippi, a 
Luria, a Hohenstiel-Schwangau. Their work 
in the social fabric he leaves us to infer, if we 
will, from their spirit and fitness ; but we see 
them merely in situ. The social problem was 
not his to solve, but the endlessly varied pro- 
blem of the individual. It is the individual soul 
that counts with him, not the soul corporate ; — 
as he makes Tiburzio say in Luria : 

"A people is but the attempt of many 
To rise to the completer life of one ; 
And those who live as models for the mass 
Are singly of more value than they all." turia, act v. 2ed 

Always the poet of the individual initiative and 
the supreme moment,— this is what we are 
aware of in Browning. 

Just here it is that Tennyson's difference be- 
comes most pronounced and potent. To him 
too the ideal manhood was the product of a 
kind of voyage of discovery; but as befits a 
clergyman's son, bred in the establishment, the 
accepted Christology was taken for granted, as 
a point of departure, from which he would set 

21 



(Ude 3bv((6 ®"^ ^^ annex new realms or applications. And 
L . g ^ in thus cutting loose from the theological tra- 
^0 trie dition he was as truly an amateur philosopher 

*^&^^ as Browning was an amateur theologian ; from 

both careers, indeed, we get the sense of a 
thinker invading a sphere of exploration to 
which he was not born. Nay, we may say their 
distinction as leaders comes from this fact; 
they give new vitality to thoughts that through 
perfunctory treatment were becoming steril- 
ized. We have just seen how Browning res- 
cued the concept of the ideal man from steril- 
ity, by emphasizing its individualized parts, en- 
dowments, achievements, and bringing down 
the divine to supplement them. But another 
way of rescue also was needed, an opposite ap- 
proach; for the concept may just as truly be- 
come sterile by being imprisoned in the jargon 
of theology or confined to a history long ago 
enacted in Palestine. It was to this second way 
that Tennyson's thoughts and temperament 
gravitated. To his inner vision, as to Brown- 
ing's, there rose early in his career a Christ 
figure transmuted as it were into modern linea- 
ments ; a concept that he carried with him full 
half a century before its final contour was com- 
plete and its finishing touch added. In one as- 
pect and another this concept gathered into 
itself the essential juices of a life's meditation, 
as did the Faust figure the sixty years' medita- 
tion of Goethe. But in orbing thus into a great 
type figure this idealized Personage of Tenny- 
son's must needs be related to an organic realm 
and a social world; must have united with it 

22 



a chapter of communal development, an era (^(jc 3[5pff$ 
of active principle and sentiment toned by a ^^^^ ^g^ 
knightly order. This Personage, which, going v^f^J 
back to the early traditions of the British na- *^»^^ 
tion, he shaped and refined from prehistoric 
materials, he endowed with kingliness and 
modern chivalry and named King Arthur; his 
unspoken ideal being to embody in a single 
figure at once the Englishman's epic hero and 
the Englishman's Messiah. 
Of the historic Christ, unlike Browning, he al- 
ways took the essential and typical view rather 
than the factual and personal ; recognizing in 
him, as did Mary of Bethany, the Life Indeed, 
and directing his prayer not to a form of man or 
God but to a supreme attribute in which man 
and God could share alike : 

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 5n iDcmoriam 

Believing where we cannot prove." beginning 

This, however, belongs, as we may say, to the 
hidden metaphysic of his ideal. For the flesh- 
and-blood realizatidn of it he sought rather a 
typical incarnation whom he could identify with 
modern motives and aims, and who should ap- 
pear in position as the conscience of a social 
order. Hence his choice of the "flos regum Ar- 
turus" of old Joseph of Exeter; on whom his 
musings began a full decade before he called on 
the wild New Year bells to 

" Ring in the Christ that is to be." ^" memoriam 

Thus, as we see, he takes the divine element of 
life the other way round from Browning. He 

23 



dCtje 3hv((6 sets manhood rising by evolutionary steps to- 
anb tde ward it by emulating in its institutions *'the 

ry J perfect man, the measure of the stature of the 

JiQ^^ fulness of Christ," instead of making it yearn 

down from heaven to meet a supreme human 
achievement, or gleam out from unsuspected 
places in individual humanity. 
From the beginning of his meditation on the 
Arthur story he felt, as is quoted in his Me- 
moir, that there was no greater subject in the 
world. From the beginning, too, it would seem, 
though his sense of its magnitude sometimes 
almost eclipsed it, its grand epic possibility was 
in his mind, germinating and growing. This feel- 
ing of his huge theme, in fact, generated al- 
most too great a degree of modesty ; the thrust 
of the completed epic suffers somewhat from 
it. For a while he plays with the idea, so to say, 
as in irresponsible dreams. In the epilogue af- 
fixed to his Morte D' Arthur, his first serious 
Arthurian venture, his light touch, albeit light, 
conveys a very earnest and essential note of his 
conception : 

"And so to bed; where yet in sleep I seem'd 
To sail with Arthur under looming shores, 
Point after point ; till on to dawn, when dreams 
Begin to feel the truth and stir of day, 
To me, methought, who waited with a crowd. 
There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore 
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman 
Of stateliest port ; and all the people cried, 
'Arthur is come again: he cannot die.' 
Then those that stood upon the hills behind 
Repeated — ' Come again, and thrice as fair ; ' 
IDortc JD* ar// And, further inland, voices echo'd - * Come 

tl?ur, epilogue With all good things, and war shall be no more.'" 

24 



From this modest foregleam of his purpose, 
our minds travel forward nearly half a century; 
during which time we see him in that little at- 
tic room at Farringford penning the first four 
Idylls, or pacing the Maiden's Croft back and 
forth as he composes The Holy Grail ; and when 
in 1891 he writes the last revising line of his 
completed epic, inserting it lest, as he says, 
"perhaps he had not made the real humanity 
of the King sufficiently clear in his epilogue," 
his finished conception is 

"Ideal manhood dosed in real man." 

Thus, in his own words, we have the beginning 
and the end of Tennyson's most comprehensive 
life study : the Christlike manhood, divested of 
dogmatic and ecclesiastical presuppositions, 
and working its work in a period of history 
which can be symbolically identified with the 
English nineteenth century. How different this 
from Browning's attitude and ideal, yet with 
what fine supplementation answering thereto, 
like the completing arc in the same vast orbit, 
we cannot fail to see. 



anb t^c 



moir, tool, ii 
p. 12d 

JdflU 
epilogue, 3$ 



25 



m 

3f5pff6 anb finie^cb (Bfic Cpcfe 

<^ I ' HE separate Idylls of the King did not 
vJL come before the world in a way at all 
favorable to revealing either their epic fibre or 
their epic unity. They did not lay claim to either 
quality ; could not well do so until the whole 
series was finished. Published at uncertain in- 
tervals and in hap-hazard order, from 1858, or 
more truly from 1842, to 1885, they modestly 
purported to be nothing more than modern- 
ized tales of chivalry and romance, elegantly 
wrought detached pictures, etSuXXta, all belong- 
ing to one epoch, but having only the name 
"the King" in the title as ostensible binding- 
thread. It was in genial accord with this appar- 
ent character that they were accepted and read ; 
mostly, it would seem, by youthful-minded peo- 
ple in whom fancies still ran high and the sense 
of poetic beauty was a vital passion. Tennyson's 
exquisite earlier work had in fact been select- 
ing and educating his audience ; and for the 
most part the Idylls were welcomed with an 
acclaim which our present day seldom accords 
to poetry. Fitzgerald, however, who in 1835 
had listened to the Morte D'Arthur with hearty 
praise, began to growl, deeming that Tenny- 
son was swerving from the work that he was 
cut out to do. If we take this intimate friend of 
the poet as a kind of thermometer of apprecia- 

26 



tion, the question rises, was Tennyson's tern- ^g^ 3bv(($ 
perature advancing beyond Fitzgerald's sta- ( .^ ^ 
tionary mark, or was Tennyson, in real virile ^ " 
fibre, falling below himself? It must be con- ^Q^^ 
fessed, the question was an open one. The 
main critical verdict passed upon the poems 
was that they were things of finished wizard 
beauty, richly laden, enchanting, almost cloy- 
ing; while of under-knitting strength, or of any 
appreciable epic trend, there was little if any 
presage. They were read for themselves, not 
for their relation and coordination. Following 
the first lotos influence a reaction soon set in. 
The central personage, Arthur, came in for the 
main attack : he was decried as an impeccable 
prig, who talked like a curate. The central cul- 
prit, Guinevere, whose sensuous appetency for 
Lancelot's warmth and color was undisguis- 
edly sympathized with, was championed by the 
Morris and Swinburne school as a hapless vic- 
tim of royalty and diplomatic marriage, into 
whose embittered mind, naturally enough, 

"old thoughts would crowd iOorriff 

"Belonging to the time ere [she] was bought xi^e pcfcncc 

By Arthur's great name and his little love." of :6uinevere 

Such, in chilling measure, was the handicap- 
ping fate that began to overtake the Idylls be- 
fore they were finished enough to be called in 
from their detached and unordered currency 
among more or less casual readers. Their epic 
strain, if indeed they contained such, was as 
it were in solution, apprehensible only by a 
refined spirit-sense. When, however, in 1869 
four more poems, added to the original four, 

27 



JiQce 



flttje 36pff0 supplied the beginning, the culmination, and 
anb ttfC ^^^ ^^^ ^^ ^ course of Idylls, a new critical 

judgment set in: the wide-spread and rather 
idle notion that the poems were allegorical ; a 
notion that Tennyson vigorously protested 
should not be pressed too far. They were in 
fact allegorical merely in the sense that every 
great chapter of life, read in its real meanings, 
is a virtual allegory, a parable, with all its 
deeds and events rich in second intention. No 
truth is more certain than this, that so far 
as we live inwardly we live in figure ; and the 
Idylls began to seem figurative simply and 
solely because they began to reveal their in- 
wardness. What call to retell these old Arthu- 
rian tales at all, indeed, if there did not pulsate 
in them something beyond the legend and the 
letter? This deeper something, however, was 
not in an arbitrary poetic shaping, fact or tra- 
dition turned into moralizing figure. It was in 
the substance. Accordingly, the allegory theory, 
once broached, was bound to suffer on both 
sides : the thing would neither go on all fours, 
like Bunyan's or Spenser's, nor would it cease 
to steal in between the lines as a haunting and 
elusive suggestion. With all their transparent 
clarity of tissue, in truth, the Idylls contained a 
subtle element of enigma, which would not 
down. Nor was it until 1885, when the last- 
written of them, Balin and Balan, was pub- 
lished, and the whole series was put into con- 
secutive order and divided into the conven- 
tional twelve books, that the general public 
became aware of a larger and weightier inten- 
28 



tion on the part of the poet; the intention, (C0e 3f5pff6 
namely, that the series should be read not as ^^5 jg^ 
many poems merely but as one poem, with one tt^^^ 
interrelation of parts, one thread of story, one ^^^^ 
dominating epic idea. He used indeed, while 
they were growing-, playfully to call them "his 
epic." The time now revealed that his playful 
words had been dead earnest. From this uni- 
tary point of view it is, then, not from the ear- 
lier one to which the exigences of composition 
and publication compelled us, that we ought to 
compute their intrinsic and permanent values. 
In their completed epic form the Idylls of the 
King have now been before the world one-and- 
twenty years. The most ambitious and deeply 
cherished work of the poet's life, the work into 
which he infused the ripened meditation of half 
a century, has thus attained its majority. Is not 
the time fitting, then, to inquire what this ma- 
jority date brings or holds still intact : whether 
now we may accord to the work the rights of 
wise and liberal manhood and let it speak to us 
on deep themes as a sage ; or whether we must 
coldly relegate it to the nonage of outgrown 
fancies and dreams, or stow it away in our li- 
braries as a splendid monument of time-serv- 
ing literature. Contemplated as one tissue, one 
trend of vital purpose, what is its central thrust, 
what are its values? The question has not re- 
ceived its adequate answer yet. 



29 



XV 

Ji poeticad^ ^eali^cb p^Uoeoptj^ 

^23r*VERY man, as Tennyson used to say, 
VjL imputes himself. It is so in this magnum 
opus of his. The very core of Tennyson's self, 
of the ideal which was his life, is imputed here. 
And it is the core of a personality which, as 
all who knew agree in saying, loomed much 
greater than the work he did. A curious dis- 
crepancy, in fact, and one hard to resolve, has 
been noted. The poetic work that we have from 
him is pure and polished beauty; the man was 
rugged massive strength. His very face and 
mien, like that of an old-time British king, his 
conversation, so wise and weighty, seemed al- 
most to belie that delicate artistry of his ; it was 
as if a Michael Angelesque sculptor had taken 
to carving cameos and intaglios. Yet even to 
popular apprehension the personality seemed 
dimly to show through the poetic glamour; it 
was not entirely undiscovered ; in the Globe edi- 
tion of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, 
as a slight indication, the vignette of the title- 
page, representing King Arthur in robe and 
crown, is a portrait of Alfred Tennyson. How 
then, we are impelled to ask, did such a per- 
sonality manage— or happen— so to diffuse 
and disguise itself in a haze of poetic fancy and 
delicacy that we must needs have recourse to 
a penetrative spirit-sense to disentangle it? 

30 



^^ee 



What pulsation of a personal heart of oak is (l£^e 3lhv(i6 
connoted, for instance, by that feminine diathe- ^^j) jg^ 
sis to which his thought so inveterately gravi- 
tates,— the Enids and Lynettes and Ettarres 
and Viviens and Isolts and Elaines and Guine- 
veres who are always at the storm-centre of his 
plot? These are Idylls of the King ; and yet the 
first four of them were all named by women's 
names. 

Our answer to this inquiry, and therewith as 
I think the clue to his appraisal of supreme val- 
ues, lies largely in a just understanding of his 
intrinsic mind and art. 

The idiom to which Browning's art had in- 
stinctive recourse, as a glance makes us aware, 
was the psychological. "The development of a 
soul —little else is worth study,"— is how, in 
his preface to Sordello, he defines his main in- 
terest. Accordingly, from the beginning of his 
career he plunged with youthful ardor and 
youthful rashness into the thickets of psycho- 
logical activities ;— as in Pauline he said of his 
soul: 

"It has strange impulse, tendency, desire, 
Which nowise I account for nor explain. . . 
How can my life indulge them? yet they live, 
Referring to some state of life unknown." "pauUnc, 595 

Browning was thinker first and poet after- 
ward; so imperatively so that his poetic art 
well-nigh breaks or comes near being outraged 
under his thick-crowding throng of headlong 
thoughts. Not so with Tennyson. Nay, almost 
the diametrical opposite was so. Tennyson was 
poet first, poet always. From the earliest his 

31 



(lERe 3f5yff6 whole career, on one side, was a strenuous ap- 
anb tBe prenticeship in the details of this most exqui- 

rj^ ' site of the fine arts. His idiom, equally instinc- 

*^(i^^ tive with Browning's, was the descriptive, the 

translation of values into terms of sight and 
sound. Hence, whatever of deeper and more ab- 
stract thought came to him, must come en- 
dowed with the imagery, the unerring touch, 
the minor graces, of masterly sense perception. 
He translated life as he saw it into the^'simple, 
sensuous, impassioned" medium which, as Mil- 
ton held, is essential to supreme poetic utter- 
ance. So, in his severe devotion to his art, he 
was loath to speak out of this picturing de- 
scriptive idiom, or to mingle with it, as Brown- 
ing and Wordsworth in their varying ways do, 
the idiom of the dialectical or philosophical. 
When, in the investigative course of his In 
Memoriam, he found his sorrow embarked on 
a profoundly psychological sea, he was at pains 
to disclaim the cerebrative logical method ; he 
must make his way otherwise : 

•* Her care is not to part and prove ; 

She takes, when harsher moods remit, 
What slender shade of doubt may flit, 
And makes it vassal unto love: 

"And hence, indeed, she sports with words, 
But better serves a wholesome law, 
And holds it sin and shame to draw 
The deepest measure from the chords: 

"Nor dare she trust a larger lay, 

But rather loosens from the lip 
3n XOemoTUm ^^^^^ swallow-flights of song, that dip 

tlviii. 2//4 Their wings in tears, and skim away." 

32 



Nor was this all. By long habituation to this (^^^ Jibvite 
accurately descriptive art, which in its field ^„i. ^o^ 
was quite analogous to the systematic obser- r*^ ^ 
vation of a scientist, he developed a kind of *^^^^ 
sixth sense, a sense for the interrelated total- 
ity of things, as they act upon all our senses at 
once; fusing our unbidden thoughts into one 
web of consciousness wherein the whole man 
is awake in every part. It was, though less 
dreamy and passive, some such a state as 
Wordsworth had earlier described : 

''that serene and blessed mood 
In which the affections gently lead us on, — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul; 

While with an eye made quiet by the power Wordoworri? 

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, Xintern Sbbef 

We see into the life of things. " 41 

Or, to put it in more technical terms, he devel- 
oped an instinct not only for the imagery but 
for the architectonics of his thought-world, a 
structure wherein all parts should hang to- 
gether and form a cosmos, its discords resolved 
in harmony, and all suffused with the atmo- 
sphere of finished unity. As early as his first 
published volume Arthur Hallam had written 
of him : " No poet can fairly be judged of by 
fragments, least of all a poet, like Mr. Tenny- 
son, whose mind conceives nothing isolated, 
nothing abrupt, but every part with reference 
to some other part, and in subservience to the ^l^^.^^auam*^ 
idea of the whole." «k. p. no 

We can think how this attitude to his art 

33 



JTgee 



/C0C 3bviC6 would work when, leaving the smaller world of 
anb tfie individual sights and fancies, he entered the 

' larger world of elemental energies and prin- 

ciples, —when, in other words, he essayed a 
philosophy of life. The instincts of his long- 
studied workmanship, his descriptive and lyric 
art on the one hand, his exacting sense of cos- 
mic order and interrelation on the other, must 
in like fulness be appeased. 
The quality of minute and inevitable finish in a 
great poem is in its way eminently rewarding. 
We cannot slight the masterful artistry which 
creates a full-orbed poetic world, wherein all as- 
pects of time and season are in their ordained 
place, wherein all the unnoted influences of na- 
ture, the undertow of general sentiment and 
custom, and the accurate motivation of epic 
event, are all moving together to one coordinate 
result. Such is the tissue that we note most 
comprehensively in the completed Idylls of the 
King. The work smiles with the beauty of a 
sunlit and harmonious landscape, yet is self- 
evidencing and inevitable, like a chapter of cos- 
mic fate. At the same time, it must be owned, 
we get this high quality at a sacrifice. A finely 
wrought portrayal like this does not bite, does 
not bring the reader up in a vigor of reaction. 
It lacks the thrust and inspiration of unique 
achievement, or Satanic defiance, or audacious 
uprise of spirit to new tracts of being. So its 
addition to the sum-total of manhood is not so 
much that of heroic individuality as of a Round 
Table, an era of communal order, wherein all 
elements must move upward together, not with- 
34 



out the danger that some alloy of evil may spoil (^^c 3lbvtte 
the whole and make the music mute. Its con- 






ception of vital powers is not Homeric but Vir- 
gilian : 

"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus toirga, Meneid 

Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet." vi. 726 

Thus its very finish, if we are seeking Brown- 
ing's towering impulsive values, is its weak- 
ness. If our quest is for its strength, we must 
needs seek this in the tempered conservative 
values of another order, values which, when we 
find them, may prove to be no whit the less real 
and momentous for being less obtrusive. 
Tennyson's philosophy of life, coming as a 
kind of evolved afterthought, and having to be 
transmuted into terms of a concrete poetic ar- 
tistry, remained always essentially descriptive, 
a philosophy conveyed in a sensuous and pic- 
turesque medium, aided by his remarkable 
power of clean phrasing. The results must be 
reckoned with fairly and penetratively. To one 
who cannot follow the transmutation all the 
way to poet-land it plight look superficially like 
an amateur philosophy, like what our modern 
slang would call butting into the metaphysic 
preserves. And indeed, the fact that he devel- 
oped his large interpretation of life slowly, nat- 
uralizing its abstract principles only as fast as 
he could make them realistic in his descriptive 
imagination, might easily lead one to think so. 
A German translator of In Memoriam, who read 
the poem only as a hap-hazard miscellany of 
elegiac lyrics, spoke of its underlying generali- 
zations as "philosophische Griibeleien jugend- 

35 



(^^C 35pff6 licher Art," philosophic twiddlings of juve- 
anb tSc "^^^ character, — a not unnatural judgment of 

Jiaee ^^^ German mind. But surely, here the poet's 

® personality and life-meditation rise up to give 

pause to such hasty judgment. We can test the 
peculiar character of his philosophy, its com- 
bination of image and abstraction, by such 
poems as The Higher Pantheism, written for 
the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society, 
and De Profundis, and The Ancient Sage, and 
Akbar's Dream. We must, however, to be fair, 
estimate his philosophy by his organic world of 
thought, not by detached and pictured details. 
Nor will it pay to jump to conclusions as to its 
depth. Its very transparency may deceive. A 
philosopher runs risks in translating abstrac- 
tions into the sensuous and concrete ; you may 
thereby see its principles so clearly as to miss 
its hidden bearings, its threads of vital connec- 
tion. 

The poet has indeed not escaped this adverse 
judgment. A recent writer, to whom his con- 
servative spirit is not truly congenial, avers that 
Tennyson, for all his long dominance of his 
England, did not really strike into the central 
current of the age's spiritual movement, but 
stranded himself in an outlying eddy; while, 
as representative of the main current, he would 
name for chief distinction such men as Zola and 
Ibsen and George Meredith. Well, perhaps the 
question of main currents and eddies is, after 
all, relevant only to the mind which pronounces 
on them ; perhaps indeed, as in the old empire, 
all roads of earnest ideal lead ultimately to 
36 



Rome. With this matter, however, I have (^(i^ 3b^Ct6 
nothing here to do. Nor am I holding a brief ^„^ ^g^ 
for Tennyson's superiority or supremacy in rj^ ^ 
thought-values. My object is merely to set forth, *^»^^ 
as fairly as I may, what I think they are, in this 
crowning work of his. For the rest, when we 
have the data in hand, we may safely be left to 
judge for ourselves. 



37 



(t?ic Wtimate iSoal of Itcnnpon'e ^tubf 

V f V * HAT these thought-values are, —have I 
\jj kept this answer waiting too long? It 
seems to me rather that its elements, or at least 
its groundings, have been rising luminously to 
view all the while. We have but to bring out 
and coordinate a little more, on the basis we 
have, and add the aspect with which specifi- 
cally we can connote the idea of permanence. 
And one thing we may premise: he was not 
stranded in a side-eddy of movement. He was 
working at a depth so far beneath, or perhaps 
steering for a haven so far beyond, that the 
world has a good stretch of sailing yet to do, 
albeit on the sea which its long-established 
ideals have made familiar, before it catches up 
with him. It was not for nothing, nor for any 
subordinate thing, that he laid out half a cen- 
tury's creative thought and massive personal- 
ity on the theme of ** ideal manhood closed in 
real man," expanding his concept the while to 
the dimensions of a world-period and a social 
order. The real heart of this theme, when we find 
it, we shall recognize as a thing that needed 
setting forth, and as a thing done to stay. 

We have spoken of the dominating person- 
age of the Idylls; but to resolve the poet's me- 
ditation into a study of the person of Arthur, 
whether as ideal manhood closed in real man 

38 



JjQe$ 



or as a modern gentleman of stateliest port, is /C?e 3f6pff6 
only to break ground on his real subject; only ^^^5 ^g^ 
to construct as it were the personal scaffolding 
inside of which, like a fair city built to music, 
a great truth of life, nay the greatest, is taking 
form and articulation and beauty. We must 
penetrate to the underworld of motive and 
principle whence proceeds the greatness, the 
rounded manhood truth, without which no com- 
munal order can permanently survive. 
When we ask what this supreme principle is, 
we are conducted straight to the one vital sub- 
ject of the world;— for all subjects that have 
hands and feet and will and power run up ulti- 
mately into one. Schopenhauer may dream of 
the world as will and idea, Nietszche of the 
world as sheer overbearing will alone, but they 
leave unanswered the question : Will to do and 
be what? and their speculations run inevitably 
into a chaos of pessimism. Philosophers and 
prophets have brooded dimly upon the problem, 
feeling the thrill of the one solution long before 
they could clarify it with words, searching what 
or what manner of time the spirit that was in 
them did signify. Poets and romancers, who 
stand on the shoulders of the philosophers and 
see more intuitively, are drawn by a kind of 
cosmic vibration to it, as the needle is drawn 
to the pole. You cannot sing a living song, can- 
not write a popular novel, cannot make an ac- 
ceptable drama, whether in earnest or sport, 
without paying homage to it. It holds forth the 
one promise of restful outlook for life. What 

39 



^0e 3lbvii6 ^^^^^^ proof do we need of the reality of a thing 
I ^c unseen than is afforded by the multitudinous 

0^0 it) c musings of men who even in darkest hours and 

*^^^^ dimmest prospects still 

3n iDcmortam "trusted God was love indeed 

Ivi. 4 And love Creation's final law"? 

What better, unless it be the lighter thoughts 
and feelings with which the world is laden, and 
with which men play? Love is, properly speak- 
ing, the one universal subject about which the 
world cares. What is the central endeavor of 
romance, to say nothing of poetry and elo- 
quence, but a tireless exploitation, in its count- 
less aspects, of the psychology of love? That is 
its recognized province. Like the fairy-tales, it 
is desperately set on conducting its army of 
mutually infected couples, out of every conceiv- 
able difficulty and untowardness, to the point 
where in the conjugal fruition of love they can 
"live happily ever after." 
But romance has contented itself, for the most 
part, with one section of the vast field. Stand- 
ing in wonder and delight before that mysteri- 
ous magnetism of spiritual force which seizing 
on two unlike hearts makes them one, "conso- 
nant chords that shiver to one note," and in the 
twinkling of an eye transforms for them the 
whole universe, romance is so dazzled with the 
sight that it looks no farther. It is enough for 
it to have penetrated to the beating heart of 
the matter, and to have nobly appropriated the 
central source of life's joys and potencies. But 
what of love in the mind as well as in the pas- 
sions ? What of love in the enlightened will, deal- 
40 



JjQce 



ing with the needy affairs of a world, with law (l£fjc 3f5pff0 
and social order and the rights of other united ^^^ ^a^ 
couples, as each moves in its divinely vitalized 
circle ? What of love in man's allotted sphere 
of work and personal power? What of love at 
its attained goal of conjugal fellowship, in or- 
dained position to reach beyond the horizon of 
the couple and the home and act upon the out- 
lying world? Is love then merely an elemental 
league offensive and defensive, a multiplication 
of selfishness by two, with an obverse of hate 
or exclusiveness or indifference ; or may it, from 
the centre where it has learned to forget its 
self-seeking, spread out waves of like radi- 
ance to all mankind? Shall we love others bet- 
ter for having found the love of one, or shall 
our hearts be imprisoned in a conjugal enclos- 
ure, with no warmth and blessing to spare for 
the needy mass outside? And if love transcends 
the conjugal enclosure, how shall it be guided 
and regulated, that its working to the farthest 
circumference of its power be good and not 
evil? Multitudes of questions like these throng 
into a mind of larger mould like that of Tenny- 
son, as soon as he moves in the idiom of the 
Love absolute, and realizes in its depth and 
breadth that love is creation's final law. And it 
is just such questions as these that the poet 
is concerned to resolve, through the medium of 
these twice-told tales which he names Idylls of 
the King. 

In otherwords,hisaimisto enlarge the theme 
of love to epic proportions, by interweaving it 
with the ongoings of civilization and history. 
To this end he starts where the romantic sen- 

41 



(^^e 3bpffe timent of the world leaves off, though not with- 
anb tRc ^^^ taking full account of its values ; namely, 

7((tc6 ^^ ^^^ point where love makes transition from 

^ the tether of wedded union, and the purlieu of 

the household, and the ties of blood and family, 
to work its work in the larger world as a hal- 
lowing spiritual power. At this point his first 
and ostensible appeal is to those light-hearted 
readers who will cherish the poems as clean 
wholesome Idylls, and if they will it so, as no- 
thing more. The epic is not forced upon them. 
Underneath this surface appeal, however, it re- 
mains for those who will dwell patiently with the 
inner continuity of concept, and trace its funda- 
mental spiritual current, to find how far-reach- 
ing these poems are. And so if they will receive 
it, this is the epic which a half century's conver- 
sance with men's vital interests has designed. 
The modesty of its demand is no index of its 
majesty of aim. 



42 



m^oote in pcteonat (Syperience 

O^l* O this epic undertaking of Tennyson's 
VJL contributed not only his poetic bent, so 
harmoniously compounded of the imaginative, 
the scientific, and the philosophical, but also 
some very momentous lines of his own per- 
sonal experience. 

As early as 1833 he had mused on the legends 
of King Arthur, and had sketched the scenario 
of a kind of musical masque on the subject. 
Just here, however, taking note of the date, 
which was that of his annus mirabilis , we must 
reckon with an event which wrought so to 
deepen his whole being that musical masques, 
or any kind of literary exquisiteness, could not 
well be the adequate vehicle of such a theme. 
In 1833 his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, dying, 
left him to recover from one of the most notable 
bereavements of literary history. Here was a 
rare friendship invaded by death ; here, in the 
poet's own bosom, the purest pulsation of 
brother-love was ravaged and desolated, ac- 
cording to first seeming, by untimely Fate. 
Thus at one staggering stroke he was brought, 
in the field of his own constant spirit, to face 
love in its most spiritual and unmixed mani- 
festation, and to know by the removal of its ob- 
ject what a tremendous power it was in life. 
We get some idea of how his mind was predis- 

43 



JTffee 



flE0e JIbviCe Posed to receive the stroke by recalling that it 
V ^tf ^ was the first invasion by death of the circle of 

anp iff^ ^^^ Cambridge "Apostles," that band of young 

men in whom was active the finest and most 
forward-looking spirit of the time. "In those 

* dawn-golden times* of the third and fourth de- 
cades of the nineteenth century," says a recent 
reviewer,* "youth was not only seething with 
speculation, penetrated with a fine disdain of 
everything selfish, petty, false, filled to the brim 
with poetry, but it had the courage of its en- 
thusiasms, it was ebullient with the conscious- 
ness of its own powers. *The world is one great 
thought,' cried Jack Kemble, 'and I am think- 
ing it ! ' " If Tennyson's spirit was always as sen- 
sitive as an Eolian harp to every breath of his 
age's thought, we can think what it must have 
been in the centre of that brilliant circle, of 
which he was the acknowledged laureate and 
Hallam, in their debating contests, "the mas- 
ter-bowman." We can think, too, how the lat- 
ter's untimely death would naturally work to 
precipitate into substance and form thoughts 
that had long been in vague solution in the 
poet's mind. 

The result was such as to reveal the momen- 
tous nature of the experience. Nine years of 
silence, for one thing, during which time he 
wrought patiently and fundamentally at his 
poetic art ; for another, an immense deepening 
and enlarging of his whole attitude to life and 
the universe. At one sharp stroke, without at 

* In the New York Times Saturday Review for January 19, 1907, arti- 
cle on Mrs. Brookfield's book "The Cambridge Apostles." 

44 



all abjuring the beauty of his youthful dreams, (J£^e 3f6pff^ 
he found himselftransplanted from poetic non- ^^^ ^a^ 
age to poetic and philosophic majority. In a n^f^^J 
very striking figure, taken from the pheno- *^» ^ 
mena of cold, he conceives first of the sudden 
congelation of his powers induced by sorrow: 

" Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, j^ iDcmoriam 

That grief hath shaken into frost 1" ^^ 2 

and then the liberation to maturer things: 

" But Death returns an answer sweet : 
' My sudden frost was sudden gain, 

And gave all ripeness to the grain, ^n iDcmoriam 

It might have drawn from after-heat' " \m^i' 3 

How much this meant for him in the large he 
records in the epilogue to In Memoriam ; writ- 
ten just at the close of his nine silent years: 

"Regret is dead, but love is more 

Than in the summers that are flown, 
For I myself with these have grown 
To something greater than before; 

"Which makes appear the songs I made 
As echoes out of weaker times, 

As half but idle brawling rhymes, 5n memoriam 

The sport of random sun and shade." Epilogue, 5, e 

In the event that gave rise to the composi- 
tion of In Memoriam, then, we are to recog- 
nize the first cardinal stroke of personal expe- 
rience in preparing the poet for his great epic 
work; and In Memoriam itself may be re- 
garded as a kind of preliminary, or under- 
study, to the deep-lying and vitalizing theme 
of the finished Idylls. Tennyson's whole nature 
speaks therein, but in a somewhat more ele- 

45 



C0e 3lbv((6 mental and compendious utterance. Of the 
anb tde Idylls his son, as biographer, writes, "We may 

7^ ^ perhaps say that now the completed poem, re- 

JiQC6 garded as a whole, gives his innermost being 

more fully, though not more truly, than In 
Memoriam." 

What, then, was the earlier poem's contribu- 
tion to the life-theme of Love, and how made? 
As to its ruling tone and method, as soon as 
we get beneath the chastened purity of its po- 
etic phrasing, we discern in In Memoriam a 
procedure which, beyond any other trait of Ten- 
nyson, naturalizes him in the dominant idiom 
of his age. It may surprise us to learn that when 
the poem came out, with its long-drawn almost 
morbid noting of all possible phases of bereaved 
grief, Huxley praised it for its ''insight into 
scientific method." The judgment was true: 
we have here the thoroughness, the precision, 
the careful observation of a scientific investiga- 
tion ; it is only the phenomena studied and the 
class of data which have kept us from count- 
ing it with the natural science researches which 
have hitherto so nearly monopolized the field 
that we have agreed to name science. The poem 
is in truth a quasi-scientific, nay let us say a 
thoroughly scientific study of the actual sur- 
vival of love, through the phenomena of associa- 
tion with grief, with a view to the bearingof this 
on the eventual survival and glorification of it 
in unseen tracts of being,— in other words, on 
the vital question of immortality. To this end, 
the poet has analyzed and interpreted love as it 

46 



makes itself felt in his own experience of be- (^^^ 3lbvi(6 
reavement, which for the purpose he has made ^^^ ^g^ 
typical and universal. Nor is its bearing alone on r^ ' 
the immortality of the individual. The thought ^^^o 
is evolutionary. It carries up the concept of sur- 
viving and ennobling love from the individual 
to the social, the species so to say, and through 
that to the cosmic reference, enlarging and en- 
riching its purview, until at the end, address- 
ing his transplanted friend, he can say, 

" Strange friend, past, present, and to be ; 
Loved deeplier, darklier understood; 

Beliold, I dream a dream of good, Jn iDemoriam 

And mingle all the world with thee." cppi^. 3 

Here we have all the elements of the later epic 
theme, only studied in more abstract form, and 
moving through another arc of the vast or- 
bit. 

A glance at Browning's differing attitude (for 
he too was a life-long student of love) is in- 
structive here, as still further accentuating the 
distinction that we have found so characteris- 
tic between the two poets. We recall that high- 
water mark of Browning's bold exploring, 
where he makes the minstrel David laugh with 
the rapture of discovery, yet curb himself with 
awe and for love's sake, at the thought that he, 
the intrepid adventurer in life-values, and if he, 
that 

"a man may o'ertake 
God's own speed in the one way of love." 0aul, 26t 

It is the exceptionally endowed individual dis- 
covering his highest possibility in God, nay for 

47 



anb t^c 



3n iDemoriam 
cp^viii. 1 



5n IDemoriam 
l|:)cpv. 16, 17 



the moment seemingly almost beyond Him, yet 
sinking the pretension and by so doing mani- 
festing a yet finer reach of love. That is Brown- 
ing's individualizing way. Tennyson's, rather, 
is to diffuse his discovery through all the world 
of common weal and onward time, broadening 
it as fast as he deepens it, thus making it uni- 
versally available. His evolutionary vision is 
not only intensive but extensive, or as he puts 
the matter: 

••The love that rose on stronger wings, 
Unpalsied when he met with Death, 
Is comrade of the lesser faith 
That sees the course of human things." 

Beyond the individual achievement or experi- 
ence both contributingand contributed to, rises 
always the background of an interrelated world 
of mankind. 

For this In Memoriam study of love Tenny- 
son chooses the sacred passion in the form of 
friendship, man for man, 

"such 

A friendship as had master'd Time; 

Which masters Time indeed, and is 

Eternal, separate from fears." 

For its transcendental involvements love can 
perhaps better be explored in this manifesta- 
tion of it:— love in its pure spiritual essence, 
its roots in what is likest God within the soul, 
its workings freed for the time from the com- 
plicating element of the sexual and the de- 
monic. But while such research of love solves 
the ethereal and eternal bearings of it, it does 



48 



not fill out the problem as this actually exists, (^fje 3lb^((6 
The David and Jonathan affection, the love that mi5 (g^ 
is "wonderful, passing the love of women," is 7r/(00 
so rarely actualized in earth that it yields light ^ 
on life mainly as an abstraction. Nor is it more 
sacred, or more free from alien and evil inva- 
sion than is the love that begins with sex. Ar- 
thur and Lancelot, fighting the world's battles 
together, felt the divine pulsation of it ; 

"Whereat the two, 
For each had warded either in the fight, 
Sware on the field of death a deathless love. 

And Arthur said, * Man's word is God in man : Xl^e Comins of 

Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death.'" Brtljur, 12e 

Yet it is one of the most poignant notes of the 
Idylls that this sacred trust was treacherously 
belied ; and Lancelot; captive to a lower allure- 
ment of love, went under. The great problem 
of love must be worked out by more intricate 
computation, and with resolving of the ele- 
ments that obtain in universal society. What- 
ever maybe true of a supersensual world where 
they neither marry nor are given in marriage, 
here on earth there is the love of sex to be 
reckoned with, a fundamental element of the 
problem. 

Then too, just beyond the elemental sway 
of passion and the enclosure of the united pair, 
there is the vital problem of love and duty; for 
Duty too, in a divinely ordered universe, must 
be listened to and obeyed as the ** stern Daugh- 
ter of the Voice of God." To one with Tenny- 
son's prevailing sense of a universe which, to 



49 



anb t^e 
JJqc6 

3n iDcmoriam 
"prologue, 4 



Ode ro Ptttf , 47 



WordJiworrl? 
Ode to IDutf , 6 



be true, must move to ** music in the bounds of 
law," this ethical element must not be ignored. 
If to Love he could say, 

"Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine," 

none the less he must say to Duty, with Words- 
worth, 

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and 
strong." 

And in looking over the world of affairs he can- 
not be unaware, as a fact to be resolved, that 

"There are who ask not if thine eye 
Be on them ; who, in love and truth, 
Where no misgiving is, rely 
Upon the genial sense of youth." 

Such as these, the great light-hearted body of 
"those who eddy round and round" must find 
their place in a love-governed world ; it is not 
a question, for them, of love or duty but of love 
and duty. 

In this part of his theme, as in the other, I am 
persuaded, we come in contact again with a 
deeply ploughing personal experience of Ten- 
nyson's. I cannot help concluding that his ear- 
lier poem of that title had its clarifying share 
in the history of his life-study of love. In its 
way this experience was perhaps as crucial 
as the one to which we refer the creation of 
In Memoriam. Tennyson's marriage, when at 
length it took place, was an ideally blessed one ; 
but are we aware that he was then nearly forty 
years old, and that his long engagement to 
Emily Sellwood had been ten years broken off? 

50 



The records of his life are very reticent about (j^fj^ 3l5«ff0 
it; but the fact was that duty, the prosaic duty ^^v ^g ^ 
of getting an income to warrant marriage, ^ ^ 
urged an inexorable prior claim. The poem ^Q^^ 
Love and Duty does not read like a merely 
dramatic putting of a case. 

"For Love himself took part against himself 
To warn us off, and Duty loved of Love — 
O this world's curse, — beloved but hated — came 
Like Death betwixt thy dear embrace and mine, 
And crying, * Who is this? behold thy bride,' 
She push'd me from thee." cove and JDutf 

The poem, a small-minded critic says, rings 
false ; it goes on to talk priggishly to the wo- 
man in the case, like a curate. But just this 
same thing, and on precisely similar grounds, 
the pagan school says of Arthur's farewell 
speech to Guinevere in the Idylls; which latter 
indeed, according to the size of the occasion 
recognized in it, is either the highest or the 
most vulnerable passage in the whole epic. It 
is the touchstone of his great theme; set, as it 
were, **for the fall and rising again of many," 
according to their harmony with the spirit of 
the poem. And in fact Tennyson's experience 
yielded him a strange repetition of deep in- 
sight. He was brought to confront the immi- 
nent stroke of a virtual new bereavement; nay, 
for ten years he was doomed to go on alone, 
the divided half of a conjugal relation, as he had 
long felt himself the divided half of a hallowed 
friendship. Was he not in position to test the 
problem of love at first hand? And just as in the 
case of Arthur Hallam's death, he coined his 

51 



fC6e 3lbvti6 ^^ys"^^l experience into a new contribution to 
anh f fi^ ^^^ question : Shall love therefore be mourned 

ano tl^e ^^^ buried as an unvital thing, or shall it sur- 

JlQce vive, and gather strength, and rise as a per- 

manent ennoblement of life to higher things? 
Shall not so divine a pulsation, even though 
benumbed by frost and hard fate, pluck good 
from its ruins? The question is no idle or theo- 
retical one with him : 

"Of love that never found his earthly close, 
What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts? 
Or all the same as if he had not been ? 

Not so: Shall Error in the round of time 
Still father Truth ? O shall the braggart shout 
For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself 
Thro' madness, hated by the wise, to law 
System and empire? Sin itself be found 
The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun ? 
And only he, this wonder, dead, become 
Mere highway dust? or year by year alone 
Sit brooding in the ruins of a life, 
cove and JDutf Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself?" 

It cannot be that love alone, among the passions 
that die only to pass into something rich and 
strange,— that love alone, highest of all, is inca- 
pable of resurrection. But how shall it rise? Its 
object cruelly thrust away by fate, its ''faith thro' 
form" ruthlessly denied him, the shock must 
needs be diffused through all his life ; in other 
words, it must be transferred from the sphere 
of a sweet and crowned passion to the sphere of 
will and work and healing hallowing time. 

* Wait, and Love himself will bring 
The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit 
Of wisdom. Wait: my faith is large in Time, 
Cove and JDutf And that which shapes it to some perfect end." 

52 



A hard sacrificial road, a veritable crucifixion, f^a^ Jlbvde 
opens before him ; to be met only by answering *^ . ^^ 
obedience and tensity of resolution : ^ " 

"Live -yet live- ^^^^ 

Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all 
Life needs for life is possible to will — 
Live happy." Cove and JDutf 

That he has in mind, however, not merely an 
exotic experience but a larger truth for all his 
kind, is evident from the following lines, which, 
warning against subsiding on a lower passion 
and accepting the loathly alternative of sense, 
touches on the very rock on which the society 
of the Round Table so sadly split: 

"Will some one say, Then why not ill for good? 
Why took ye not your pastime? To that man 
My work shall answer, since I knew the right 
And did it ; for a man is not as God, 
But then most Godlike being most a man." ^^^^ »"'* ^"^^ 

To bend his quivering wounded heart to duty, 
and to tell his lady so,— have we not here, in 
essence, the critic's note of the "impeccable 
prig"? It is the point of all his writings, per- 
haps, where the note of his philosophy comes 
nearest to being flattened to the note of the 
homiletic. But we cannot deny a fibre of strength 
in it. And so it is. You come always upon 
strength, the strength of deep-laid founda- 
tions, when you get below the delicate modu- 
lations of Tennyson's music. We shall get the 
echoes of the same austere bass note, in the 
Holy Grail and Guinevere, and indeed in all the 
poems that concern themselves with the high 
meanings and ends of the epic action. 

53 



vn 

(Svofuttonarp ^ta^ee in t^c (Sptc (ttjctne 

I HAVE dwelt on these poems that con- 
nect themselves with Tennyson's per- 
sonal experiences because they stake out in a 
way the whole inner situation of the Idylls. In 
the Idylls too the vision of love in its sacred- 
ness and glory is the inspiring object; but with 
a change and enlargement of venue. Not now 
love rising from death and sorrow, as in In 
Memoriam ; not love rising from stern repres- 
sion to richer ends, as in Love and Duty ; but 
love already in possession of all the elements 
of fruition, and working its work in the world. 
It is the very roomiest conceivable field that he 
thus lays out for it ; a ifield that taxes to the 
utmost his descriptive metaphysic, taking in 
as it does the elements of body and spirit ; love 
shed abroad not only in the passions of the 
flesh, but in the work and the wisdom and the 
will of holiest manhood. Because, then, it is 
conceived not alone in the domestic relations 
but in all the powers and activities that make 
a man large and kingly, the theme can be 
worked out only on the kingly scale, the scale 
of Arthur conceived as ideal manhood closed in 
real man. Nor can so comprehensive a theme 
well be laid down as a proposition and urged 
upon the brain, in the terms of Browning's dia- 
lectics; it must come to men as a luminous at- 

54 



mosphere, an environment of beauty, a music, 
and then most potent perhaps when least di- 
rectly realized by the reader. When therefore 
we consider the scope of his field of thought, 
we cannot say that Tennyson erred in his 
choice of a conveying medium. 
Arthur is the centre and soul of the action, in 
every componenttaleoftheseries. What Arthur 
embodies is the real propaganda that Tennyson 
has at heart. The love that suffuses such a 
kingly nature as Arthur's is the supreme ideal 
for humanity as it exists in organized civiliza- 
tion and society. But it is not Arthur who is 
directly portrayed. Rather he is the hallowing 
presence of the place ; and in the semi-detached 
stories which make up the epic we read his 
manhood as reflected in a chivalric order of 
knights and ladies, or as sinned against by 
heedlessness and self and earthly passion. A 
touch of his great manhood is smitten into every 
knight who takes his vows upon him : 

** But when he spake, and cheer'd his Table Round 
With large, divine, and comfortable words. 
Beyond my tongue to tell thee — I beheld 
From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash 
A momentary likeness of the King" ; 

and this likeness, so long as they remain undi- 
vorced from his will, they never wholly lose, 
however imperfect a reflection they may make 
of it according to their personality : 

" For good ye are and bad, and like to coins. 
Some true, some light, but every one of you 
Stamp'd with the image of the King." 

And so, each in his way, they set out to be the 

55 



anb ttfc 



jC1?c ComiriQ of 
artl?ur, 266 



»rail, 25 



fT^-ti 'Ti^.yeeit instruments of his ideal, the ideal of ennobled 

N f fi Love making a realm in the earth. 

ano tt}C 3ut in the actualized social order this regen- 

J^Qce erate passion must begin where the social or- 

der begins. It must begin with the pair, the 
couple, lover and mate ; and from the conjugal 
love and union there nucleated must radiate 
outward until its vital influence fills society 
full. It cannot ignore the social unit, that pri- 
mal segmentation by fission, as it were, from 
which the whole corporate tissue is engen- 
dered. The ideal love can neither leap to the 
highest by celibate asceticism like Galahad's 
and Percivale's, nor prosper in the lowest by 
shameless passion like Vivien's or bold con- 
tempt of conjugal faith like Tristram's or secret 
undermining of it, however varnished by brav- 
ery and courtesy, like Lancelot's and Guine- 
vere's. Each of these by-ways of love, or the 
lower instinct on which it is prone to subside, 
is followed out by some group of characters, in 
a chain of inexorable consequence, leaving the 
one ideal so much the more clearly delimited and 
defined. No: there is one, and but one, free and 
open way before it : the austere yet spiritually 
luminous road wherein love and faith, lover 
and friend, self and neighbor, home and hu- 
manity, flesh and spirit, law and liberty, each 
alike gets its harmonious measure of due, and 
neither suffers from the other. And this way be- 
gins with the sacred marriage of hearts. From 
this centre it is, the conjugal centre, that all the 
high and creative potencies of life and society 
radiate. 

56 



Such is the initial ideal that opens before 
Arthur, on his way to that battle in which he 
earns crown and realm ; an ideal the vision of 
which transfigures the world for him : 

"the world 
Was all so elear about him that he saw 
The smallest rock far on the faintest hill, 
And even in high day the morning star." 

For such conjugal ideal the pure friendship of 
Lancelot and the flush of knightly glory, much 
as they enrich the manly life of achievement, 
can in no wise compensate. 

"Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts 
Up to my throne and side by side with me? 
What happiness to reign a lonely king, . . . 
Vext with waste dreams ? for saving I be join'd 
To her that is the fairest under heaven, 
I seem as nothing in the mighty world. 
And cannot will my will nor work my work 
Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm 
Victor and lord. But were I join'd with her. 
Then might we live together as one life. 
And reigning with one will in everything. 
Have power on this dark land to lighten it. 
And power oh this dead world to make it live." 

Faithfulness to this ideal, and consistent speech 
and act in the idiom of it, are just what makes 
Arthur the remote perfection, the impeccable 
prig, of the critics ; nothing else. We may take 
the poet's conception or leave it; but this it is. 
And in truth this is what Arthur would be if 
these poems were only idle twice-told tales, are- 
hash of Malory; that is, if the Idylls contained 
no deeper story within the story. According to 
the eyes and standard by which men judge him 



anb tffc 



XI?e Comirijg of 
Hrtlpur, 96 



X\ic CominQ of 
flrtl?ur, 79 



57 



imjc 3l5pff6 he is the touchstone of hearts: either an aus- 

anb tfie ^^^^ Puritan binding men to impossible vows 

rw and out of touch with human nature ; or what 

^ Guinevere, when it is too late to mend the 

broken plan, confesses him to be: 

"Ah great and gentle lord, 
Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint 
Guinevere f 63 S Among his warring senses, to thy knights." 

In fact, his fate among men is just the poet's 
reproduction of the Messianic way among men ; 
they do to him as they list, and in the long run 
he has to die as witness to the truth. It is in 
the light of this concept that we must read 
Arthur's last tender yet doomful address to the 
fallen queen. As I have intimated, this speech 
of Arthur is either the supreme point of a vast 
epic idea or the most vulnerable point of a series 
of second-hand idylls, according to the size and 
bent of the reader; it either sounds sanctimoni- 
ous, like the homily of a curate, or in majestic 
character, as it were the eternal manhood ideal 
pronouncing doom. 

To determine which it shall be, in our large 
interpretation of the epic action, we must not 
omit also to take fair note of the other thread 
of motive that he has interwoven with the ini- 
tial love motive, the ever-vital motive of love 
and duty. The king who could so speak of out- 
raged love at the failure point of his plan, was 
also carrying a greater than domestic burden, 
a spiritual passion which all along wrought 
with the passion of the flesh to broader nobler 
ends; and so at the close of The Holy Grail, 

58 



which in the same idiom marks the true cul- 
mination of the ideal, he could say : 

"the King must guard 
That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
To whom a space of land is given to plow, 
Who may not wander from the allotted field 
Before his work be done, but, being done. 
Let visions of the night or of the day 
Come as they will ; and many a time they come, 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light. 
This air that smites his forehead is not air 
But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die. 
And knows himself no vision to himself. 
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
Who rose again." 

As we see him thus going steadily through 
duty to doom, how we are reminded of that 
idealized Being who in old scripture days cried, 
** I have trodden the wine-press alone, and of 
the people there was none with me" ! So it must 
be, in our times as in the older, until our hearts 
are enlarged to see things as they are. 
Here speaks the king in every man who will 
let his v/hole manhood speak, and who will not 
follow wandering fires, as did the Holy Grail 
knights who would patch up their broken vows 
by religious sentiment. And to this ideal their 
hearts return, when the false fires are burnt out 
and they awake to life as it is ; as the noblest 
and most responsible culprit of them all her- 
self confesses, when only heaven is left her for 
amends : 

"Ah my God, 
What might I not have made of thy fair world. 



anb t^e 
JJsce 



*raU, 901 



59 



fttje 3fbpffe 
anb tfje 

Guinevere, 64d 



a Ocatl? in tljc 
TDeffcrt, 632 



Had I but loved thy highest creature here? 
It was my duty to have loved the highest ; 
It surely was my profit had I known ; 
It would have been my pleasure had I seen. 
We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
Not Lancelot, nor another." 

There, in a word, where at last we see the high- 
est as it is and in spite of all lower preemp- 
tions love it when we see it,— there, with arms 
outspread in forgiveness and blessing, stands 
the deathless ideal which is both our con- 
science and our redemption. Nothing less than 
Arthur, the ideal incarnate and working con- 
sistently to right wrongs and survive short- 
sightedness, could be the adequate expression 
of this. Parts of it could be given, broken lights, 
the smaller and glamouring parts, otherwise. 
Guinevere wanted the warmth and color of it, 
and for a time subsided on the lower, under 
secret protest of law and truth. But when at 
last, her eyes opened and the elemental fires 
burned to ashes, she was aware that "that pure 
severity of perfect light" was the blending of all 
the primary colors and the harmonious diffu- 
sion of all manhood warmth, her supreme no- 
bility of nature woke and turned to it like the 
needle to the pole. A parable this, we say. 
Rather it is life become literal and real, the 
truth at the bottom of the well. Nor are we at 
issue here with Browning. At the heart of it, 
though reached by a different way, is the same 
thing that we have noted in his ideal, that au- 
dacious notion of 

" Indulging every instinct of the soul 
There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing." 
60 



At the frontier of the angel's land, whether we (Cf}e Jlb^Ke 
have travelled with Tennyson or Browning, anb t^e 
this ** ultimate, angels' law " comes in sight, and Jf ^ j>^ 
the soul finds its peace. 

But it was not in Tennyson's cautious nature 
to indulge instincts ; no, not for a moment. For 
him, as for Wordsworth, they were too rudi- 
mental to be accepted blindly or made the self- 
sufficient law of life. They must be subjected to 
the control of moral order and of the idealizing 
spirit. Besides, in this world wherein we live, 
this world of sensuous beauty and energy and 
glamour, we cannot ignore the existence of 
"Lancelot, nor another." With such men it is, 
men in whom the blood pulses warm and sense 
is strong, that the braveries and courtesies, the 
conventions and refinements of life, are inti- 
mately associated. An epic action of such scope 
as this must needs reckon with them. The so- 
cial order is bound up with them; cannot sur- 
vive without them. Their "high instincts" must 
be directed and regulated. So, true to the im- 
pulse of his realistic metaphysic, Tennyson 
strikes for the primal germs of action, as these 
are at work in the corporate heart. If conjugal 
love is the divinely ordained unit of social in- 
tegrity, none the less the unit of conjugal love 
itself, its elemental throb, is sexual passion, 
that magnetic pulsation sense and soul in one, 
charged positively and negatively with such 
sweet and awful power. This mystic thing, this 
wonder, as in the lightly touched romance of 
the day so in the Idylls, is the spring of the 
whole epic study before us. What shall this 

6i 



(^tjc 3r5pff6 passion be, oh, what shall it be, in the teleo- 
anb tBe logic world-order,— a union of instincts or a 

JJdce union of spiritual ideals, or both, hallowed and 

hallowing, in one ? When out of twain emerges 
through its fateful power one heart and will, 
what shall the one be? This was the crux of Ten- 
nyson's problem, on which his mind fastened 
with a sureness of insight at once creative and 
scientific. On the solution hung untold issues, 
broad as the world, yet inevitable as the pro- 
cesses of natural law and evolution. It was in 
the same scientific spirit and method which 
Huxley praised in In Memoriam that Tenny- 
son approached the great subject. It was at 
bottom a psychological and biological investi- 
gation. For its solution he must lay things out 
on a large scale, the scale not of the individual 
but of the species ; and as he saw the species 
not crude and animal, but refined and spirit- 
ualized, to fit his research he must needs create 
a poetic world, and people it, and endow it with 
a round of seasons and weathers, burgeoning 
spring and full flower and withered leaf and 
icy winter, suffusing it all with an endlessly re- 
sponsive yet limpid atmosphere. In his sense 
of completeness no minutest element of the 
process, in nature or spirit, could be over- 
looked. 

The large course of this poetic world of his 
was marked out by his apprehensive sensitive 
nature. It could hardly have been other than in 
the negative direction. The Idylls of the King, as 
has been remarked, are a modern Paradise Lost. 
From the first "little rift within the lute," the 
62 



first unguarded moment of giving that primal (^^e 3ibv((6 
instinct free course or one smallest advantage ^^5 ^r^ 
of upper hand, this nineteenth century epic Tf/*^^ 
traces the subtle accumulative results, through ^ ® 
all the bliss and woe of it, traversing 

"The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good, 
The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill," cove and puty 

until, as by inevitable fate, the fair Round Table 
goes under in mist and gloom. Yet by that very 
means, with its inexorable concatenation of 
cause and effect, the truth stands out at last 
all the clearer, that it ought not so to have been. 
Arthur passes, but he cannot die ; and the world 
of ideal can never again be as if he had not lived. 
By the very ruins in which the old order is left 
weltering the air of truth is immensely cleared. 
And this latter-day Christ, the ideal manhood 
closed in real man, like the ancient one, is obe- 
dient even unto death, and the road that opens 
there is the road of resurrection. 
Such was Tennyson's way, marked out by tem- 
perament and by tender depth of insight. A 
paradise with such subtly disintegrating ele- 
ments at work in it could hardly be other than 
a Paradise Lost. He could not solve and dis- 
miss the matter with the aggressive noncha- 
lance of Browning ; could neither cut the knot 
of the problem and leap to the intuitive ideal 
height, nor accept the splendid instinct and 
ensue it — could not leave the mastery of the 
problem either with a Galahad, supinely ascetic 
and saintly, or with a Gawayne, the puppet of 
the moment ''whom men call Light-of-Love." 

63 



(^^e Jb^i(6 Browning cuts the knot ; and when only indi- 
anb t^e vidual souls are in the balance, with what ease ! 

JJnee ^^s Ottima and Sebald, in the very apogee of 

sinful passion and crime, are in a moment 
brought to their holier selves by the casually 
overheard song of the silk-winder Pippa. Ten- 
nyson was not made of such lightly optimistic 
stuff. There were too many tangles and ten- 
drils in the corporate life to be disengaged and 
straightened, too much that usage and custom 
had burned into the communal blood, too com- 
plex laws of interactive being calling for ap- 
peasement, to make the enigma an easy one. 
All this, as we see, consorts accurately not only 
with Tennyson's temperament but with that 
huge life-theme of his, broader than Brown- 
ing's, which could not deem the individual soul 
evolved to the height until there was interwoven 
with its powers a social function satisfied, a ful- 
filled relation to its heritage of law and custom 
and sentiment,— in a word, the coordinate ele- 
ments of a world vitalizable by the holiest po- 
tencies of love. The man and the characteristic 
problem make the difference. 
In thus following from its beginnings the subtle 
course of a modern Paradise Lost, the poet 
strikes, quite naively, for the very storm-centre 
of the social problem, "the woman in the case" ; 
it is this fact, largely, which imbues his story 
with an undeniable feminine and as it were pas- 
sive tone. This, however, not in airy lightness, as 
does the general tissue of modern romance, but 
in almost too abysmal seriousness.The kingly 
and initiative halfof the ideal, Arthur, is already 
64 



an era-filling presence before him ; what now of (^fjc 3Ibpff6 
thequeenlyandresponsivehalf, so ordained and atxb t^C 
typified in the conjugal marvel of love? Untold JJqc^ 
things depend on the answer she makes to the 
high purpose laid upon her, on the way she ac- 
cepts and ensues the huge responsibility. As the 
spiritual arbitratrix of society, she must be not 
only a woman but a queen. As the wandering 
bard had sung of Arthur at the beginning, 

"and could he find 
A woman in her womanhood as great 
As he was in his manhood, then, he sang, 
The twain together well might change the world," :6uincvcrc, 29(5 

so Arthur, single-hearted in his large kingly 
design, entered the sacred sacrament of mar- 
riage as to a consecration, 

"Believing, ' Lo, mine helpmate, one to feel 
My purpose and rejoicing in my joy. ' '* *u<ncvere, 482 

But a shadow falls across the very threshold 
of the lofty purpose; the bard's chant is not fin- 
ished : 

"even in the middle of his song 
He faltered, and his hand fell from the harp. 
And pale he turn'd, and reel'd, and would have fallen, 
But that they stay'd him up ; nor would he tell 
His vision." :6miKvcrc, 300 

It remained for Tennyson to tell it, in its sweet 
sad length of fated history, a history of earthly 
failure. The highest trust ever laid on woman 
was laid on Guinevere ; if she failed, and dragged 
a realm into her failure, was it from spiritual 
overstrain, because it is not in woman to fill out 
the scope of a world ideal, or from spiritual sub- 
sidence on shortsightedness and unguarded 
passion? The whole problem of the masculine 

65 



(^(jc 3f6pff^ and feminine elements of life, and their inter- 
anb ttie action and coordination, lies involved here. 

Jictee ^^ ^^^ ^^ "^ means, however, to construe 

® this failure of the Table Round as in any sense 

Tennyson's indictment of womankind; as if, 
like Adam, he too would say, "The woman 
whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me 
of the tree, and I did eat." In every sensitive 
pulsation of his nature, side by side with what 
so fatefully is, he makes clear what might have 
been; there are Enids as well as Viviens, 
Elaines as well as Guineveres. Nay, the course 
of growing evil in the Table Round is just the 
opposite of spiritual overstrain ; spiritual drift- 
ing and apathy rather, leaving the holier wo- 
manhood flaccid with too little exercise. !f love 
maimed or perverted may go as low as hell, no 
less truly, in free and holy course, even without 
transcending its initial domestic tether, it may 
rise and lift the human soul to purest heaven. 
The highest impulse in life, yet also corruptio 
optimi pessima . Just because it is so high, the 
law of its sweet passion working in inverse 
order may plunge it to the very nadir of base- 
ness. It was at the vivid realization of this por- 
tentous fact that Tennyson trembled. Like 
Goethe, he saw woven into the human tissue 
the eternal truth that the woman-power, so 
yielding and self-immolating, is yet the upward 
pull of the world, — 

:&oetl}e, Smet "Das Ewig-Weibliche 

end Zieht uns hinan." 

, But just because this is so, here is the storm- 
66 



Jig;c6 



2»crlin and 
toivicn, 5Se 



centre of social welfare and progress ; this (^a^ 3f5pff0 
power it is, with its fascinating and baleful ^^.v ^a^ 
potencies, which in every age and clime needs ^ 

the watchfulness and warning. No fact or ten- 
dency of life could be to him, or to any deeply 
reflecting mind, more palpable than this. From 
the crude old Homeric days of fierce barbaric 
passions, wherein 

"He saw two cities in a thousand boats 
All fighting for a woman on the sea," 

through the slow ages to his own time, a time 
in whose heart he still discerned how with the 
laggard growth of the higher realization of love 
there had kept even pace the creeping fires of 
illicit passion and cynic lawlessness and treach- 
erous adulteries and cold divorce of hearts ; nay, 
even to the jumbled and myopic sentiments of 
our latest civilization;— -to his apprehensive 
mind this elemental affinity was the primal 
source from which the ultimate order must 
take its principle. It was virtually the same 
initium that Goethe recognized in society, 
when 

"He took the suffering human race, 
He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
And struck his finger on the place. 
And said : Thou ailest here, and here !*' 

From this focal point it was, therefore, that the 
regeneration must come. 
From the beginning of Tennyson's Arthur vi- 
sion, while as yet his vast theme was drawing 
near shimmering and inchoate, 

"First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent 
Along the wavering vista of his dream," 

67 



2DattJ?cw 
arnold 
iDcmorial 
hcrffCB 



Lowell, bieion 
of Sir /launfal 



J^QCe 



rtT^e 3bfi(6 we have to reckon with his unqualifiedly poeti- 
anb tfie ^^^ medium of realization. If adumbrations of 

the philosophy of it draws his brain, yet this 
Ewig-Weibliche it is which nucleates his un- 
bidden fancy. He lays hold of his ideal, so to 
say, by the womanly side of it ; and it is through 
the free play of a certain feminine suscepti- 
bility that he grows into his poetic maturity. As 
early as 1833 we begin to notice this. His first 
youthful incursion into Arthur-land, in The 
Lady of Shalott, played round one cardinal 
element, the power of love in the woman her- 
self, as it wakes from vague revery to reality, 
becoming "half-sick of shadows," and absorbs 
her being to the yielding of life itself; a theme 
afterward elaborated to one of the deepest mo- 
tives of the epic cycle, in the idyll of Lancelot 
and Elaine. Two focal points in the large issue 
of it next engage his fancy: the monumental 
closing scene of the Morte D'Arthur, wherein 
"the old order changeth, yielding place to new " ; 
and the saintly element of Sir Galahad, where- 
in the might of the pure heart foreshadows the 
crisis of love and duty in The Holy Grail. But 
while thus these two outlining peaks of the 
epic situation were emerging from the nebu- 
lous landscape of his philosophy, it is interest- 
ing to note that his prescient fancy had seized 
on the most subtly portentous situation of all, 
that too unguarded scene in which Guinevere 
rides with Lancelot, through spring and flow- 
ers, to her marriage with Arthur. I refer to 
the fragment Sir Launcelot and Queen Guine- 
vere, which portrays the incident to which 
68 



Tennyson's thought oftener reverts, perhaps, /t^c yis..pcr 
than to any other in the course of the Idylls, and '^^^ ^ t'F"^^ 
which even in the holy house at Almesbury the ^^ ^v^ 
hapless queen cannot let herself recall without ^^^0 
growing ** half-guilty in her thoughts again." 

"Doch — alles was dazu mich trieb, Sauot Hm 

Gott! war so gut! ach war so lieb!" 6runnen 

It is the point from which steals forth all the 
sweet woe of the poem, to spread insidiously 
and issue eventually in the ruin of the Order; 
the point of which yet we cannot think without 
the tender yet not rebellious feeling, "Oh, the 
pity of it!" 

So much, then, had been touched upon and 
sketched before the first four Idylls of the King 
were given to the world; already, both poeti- 
cally and philosophically, a fairly significant nu- 
cleus of the eventual epic outline. When, in 
1858, these first Idylls were published, however, 
readers saw at the head of them not the king's 
name at all, nor that of any knight, but four 
women's names; as if subtly intimating that 
womanly lives were the vital centres and deter- 
minators of the whole fate of things. And this 
in Tennyson's mind was the hidden truth. 
These four women, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and 
Guinevere, stand, so to say, at the four cardi- 
nal points of the spiritual compass. Two of 
them, the first two named, represent as it were 
the polar opposites, the zenith and nadir, of 
woman's love, as hallowing the conjugal state 
and as poisoning the insolence of illicit passion. 
This we know was in the poet's mind because, 

69 



J(Qe6 



(Hfje 3lbvii6 ^ ^^^^ printed and then withdrawn before 
anb tBt publication, there were only these two poems 

^ entitled, Enid and Nimue, The True and the 

False. Not to be too openly didactic, however, 
he suppressed the sub-title with the change of 
the second name from Nimue to Vivien, and to 
the two poems added Elaine, in whom we read 
again love ministrant to the end and stronger 
than life, and Guinevere, in whom we read not 
the Rhadamanthine judgment of earthly cause 
and effect only but the beginnings of a purer 
love re-orient out of sin and ruin. Thus we can- 
not well call this first installment of the epic 
vaguely related or hap-hazard. In these Idylls 
the epic outline is already rough-hewn, as de- 
termined by the vital influence of woman-love. 
In these four poems, in truth, we have the heart 
of the epic. 

One more Idyll there is of cardinal import, 
namely. The Holy Grail; which to the basal ele- 
ment of love as earthly passion adds, or rather 
brings out into articulation and relief, the 
crowning element of love and duty. This strand 
of the theme must needs be inwoven for com- 
pleteness ; for love touches not only the rela- 
tions of earth but the holy aspirations of hea- 
ven. No other poem of such mystical strain was 
ever written by Tennyson ; yet none so reveals 
his substratum of sound and saving good 
sense. Starting, like the other idylls, from the 
initial prompting of a woman, a nun with her 
ascetic holy dreams, and following out to its re- 
sultant "wandering fires" a half-insane spasm 
of superstition that invaded the Round Table, 
70 



the action portrays what comes when love (H^e 3[5pffe 
glances off from its daily work and its conjugal ^j^^ f fi^ 



JiQC0 



bonds in the direction of a dreamy sublimated 
religion. In the fact that there is left of it all 
only vague disillusion and a lean and crippled 
Order, and in the fact that of the only one who 
succeeded in the quest, Galahad, the most that 
can be said is, 

"And one hath had the vision face to face, 
And now his chair desires him here in vain, XY^e ijolf 

However they may crown him otherwhere," *rail, 896 

we read how in his ripened meditation the 
poet resolves once for all his nobly conceived 
loyalty to love and duty. No other idyll, we are 
told, cost him so much thought, or was ap- 
proached with such hesitant awe, as this. He 
felt in writing it that he was bringing his age*s 
sacredest aspirations of religion into the arena 
of practical life and action, and that his words 
must be wisely chosen. One is inclined to call 
it the noblest idyll of all the series, the poem in 
which the poet's ideal attains its high-water 
mark and opens in its fulness earthward and 
heavenward. 
In the same volume in which The Holy Grail 
appeared, published in 1869, were included also 
the idylls which begin and end the series. The 
Coming of Arthur and The Passing of Arthur, 
the latter enlarging the earliest written Morte 
D'Arthur and adjusting it to the completed epic 
scheme. By this time the poet's message is 
fairly well articulated. It would be deeply in- 
teresting if our present study permitted to run 
overthe idylls subsequently added; but though, 

71 



anb t^e 



of artljur, 46d 



IJow it Qtrikea 
a Contemporarf 



in the light of the completed cycle, even richer 
in large suggestion than the first four, they are 
in a sense intercalary, being introduced for bal- 
ance and concatenation, in the poet's endeavor 
to trace every vital aspect and shading of his 
theme. They reveal what has already been men- 
tioned, the essentially scientific craving of his 
mind, that no link of his large demonstration 
be lost. Along with this quasi-scientific thor- 
oughness goes also his artistic poetic sense; 
shown most strikingly, perhaps, in the way he 
makes the whole series conform to the advan- 
cing seasons of the year, from the early bud- 
ding of springtime, when the season burgeons 
into green and flowers, onward steadily to the 
shortest and gloomiest day of winter, and the 
final note of season, which is the last line of the 
poem, — 

"And the new sun rose bringing the new year." 

To every suggestion of the year's course, with 
its weathers and its aspects of nature, the sen- 
timent of the epic, as in a providential frame- 
work, is exquisitely, not to say almost labori- 
ously, fitted. We look at the poet toiling thus at 
the articulations of his vast vision, and we think 
of Browning's description of the obscure poet 
in How it Strikes a Contemporary: 

"Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief, 
Thro' a whole campaign of the world's life and death, 
Doing the King's work all the dim day long." 

When we realize the final scope of it, and the 
meditation that has for half a century gone to 
the finished shaping, it is a truly engaging his- 
tory of poetic creation. 
72 



vin 

^(eeeeement of ^eeibnaC t>a(ne6 

y 1 V'HAT now is the net result of all this, 
V_L^ looking at the epic theme as a whole? 
In what large interest are these elusive threads 
of human love so carefully disentangled and 
followed out to their results in nature and spirit? 
Never was poem more minutely wrought and 
finished ; never subject more sternly held to all 
its threads of involvement. Does the end crown 
the work? 

The answer to this inquiry brings us to the real 
centre of the criticism that must be passed upon 
the Idylls ; for they are by no means above it, 
nay, perhaps the criticism must be graver as 
their line of endeavor is more comprehensive 
and strenuous,— 

"Quern si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis." 

The world, reading the Idylls for the most 
part as detached stories of the Arthurian le- 
gend, has hitherto felt itself subjected to the 
marvellous magic of their poetic grace and 
beauty ; and this aspect of the case has of course 
its own critical canons, potent as far as their 
jurisdiction extends. On this partial ground I 
myself have long delayed writing on them, in 
spite of a virtual promise made thirteen years 
ago to Lord Tennyson ; in the somewhat vague 
feeling that the poems were over-meditated 
and over-elaborated, as if in carrying the subject 

73 



Ovid, iDctamor// 



(^^e 3bf((e with him so many years the poet had let the 
anb t^e fruit hang until it was a bit too ripe. An analo- 

JJae$ ^^^^ criticism has been made, and is perhaps 

due, on the closest literary parallel to this long 
reflection, the second part of Goethe's Faust. 
Viewed, however, not as a mere collection of ro- 
mantic stories but as the finished epic which 
the poet designed, this over-ripe fruitage as- 
sumes a quite different guise. The fault, if fault 
they have, lies, I am persuaded, in the scientific 
temper of presentation which the poet partly 
has in himself and has partly imbibed from the 
mind of his age. The care and conscience laid 
out on the exact motivation of events incurs the 
defect of its qualities. The subtle psychology 
of love and its unbalancing lawless rival is pur- 
sued almost to the excess of minuteness ; every 
nuance is cut accurately to the line ; until in the 
very wealth of the poet's realistic philosophy 
one's free poetic sense is at the point of protest, 
beingalittle unready to accept so complete mar- 
riage of imaginative delicacy and scientific thor- 
oughness. And so, just as the same essential 
method makes In Memoriam appear morbid, it 
makes these poems seem over-refined, labored, 
the made article rather than the spontaneous. 
Surely, we say, seasons and weathers, motives 
and consequences, do not weave themselves so 
unerringly together in the real world. The fin- 
ished work accordingly suffers on both sides. 
As single stories, the Idylls lack the limpidness 
of the real ; they are too suggestive of a sweetly 
built demonstration, or if you please, of allegory. 
As a unitary epic tissue, to say nothing of the 
74 



hazardousdeviceof constructing an esoteric ac- ^^g^ 3f6ttff0 
tion out of independent story elements, there is j! . ^ ^ 
SL lack of the epic sweep and vigor which belong ^^ ^"^ 
to one powerfully conceived course of charac- *^ff^^ 
tery and event. Perhaps the huge scope of the 
concept could not well have been filled out other- 
wise ; at any rate, underlying it all is that scien- 
tific exaction which will not leave any aspect of 
the case undemonstrated. 

When we get below questions of method, we 
must admit, I think, that the thesis of the epic 
resolves itself into something not greatly unlike 
a sermon. There is, after all, considerable jus- 
tice in the reproach that Arthur talks like a 
curate. In harmony with the poet's whole tem- 
perament, the work is a plea for law, order, re- 
gulated conservatism. It is concerned with no 
revolutionary propaganda or bold uprise of 
spirit as Browning was, but rather with keep- 
ing the wholesome restraints of religion and 
duty and sound sentiment intact. Its ideal man- 
hood must pay homage to these, ignoring no- 
thing, perverting nothing. To this end the poet 
stations himself at the point where love is most 
purely a passion, where current romance is so 
gaily at play, where shifting sentiment is so 
myopic and heedless; and from here he pa- 
tiently traces all the tendencies, perils, vaga- 
ries, aberrations, which a scientist of the mat- 
ter must note ; but always with an austere sense 
of the tremendous issues involved, and with a 
tempering balancing aim, drawing upward to 
the highest spiritual ideals and values. 

So spiritual an ideal, urged baldly and pre- 

75 



anb t^e 



*arctl? and 
/ifnettc, 263 



6aUn and 
£»alan, 531 



ceptively, would inevitably encounter the iner- 
tia and remonstrance of the worldly-minded, 
the rebellious, the unspiritual. And indeed Ten- 
nyson is aware that he is cutting across their 
grain, that his ideal, while the only tenable 
one for true manhood, is too transcendent for 
direct practical appeal. As the worldly-wise 
Merlin puts it to Gareth : 

"so thou pass 
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become 
A thrall to his enchantments, for the King 
Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame 
A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
No man can keep." 

His artistic problem, if we may so define it, is 
to induce the mass of readers who so need the 
steadying influence of his message to pass be- 
neath the gateway and take the high vows of 
life; nor is he insensible to the sneers and de- 
precations that are sure to rise, both outside 
and within the gates of the ideal. And indeed 
no phase of objection or ridicule or contempt, 
in that campaign of "sense at war with soul" 
which the poet says is here shadowed, escapes 
his sharp ken. If the perverse heart kicks 
against it, he shows as accurately as any objec- 
tor just why and how the kick comes in; it is a 
part of his keen spiritual insight. From the ap- 
proving words of Merlin, just quoted, down to 
the point where Balin, 

"Tore from the branch and cast on earth, the shield. 
Drove his mail'd heel athwart the royal crown," 

every sneer or remonstrance or defiance is 
anticipated. Yet high above all the duty and 

76 



JTffee 



the vision exist, must exist whether men will (i^^c 3ibv{(6 
hear or forbear; though blurred and sinned ^^^ ^a^ 
against yet unmarred by contempt or perver- 
sity. The world must not let them die. 
In fact, he has embarked upon a theme which 
in the religious evolution of the ages has be- 
come a truism ; its universality and obviousness 
have made it so. It is such a theme as a man 
like Tennyson, with a heritage of clerical tra- 
dition reenforced by poetical and prophetic sen- 
sitiveness, might be expected to urge. But as he 
well knows, such a theme cannot make its way 
by preaching. One touch of the didactic, one plea 
of the sermonizer, would hopelessly flat the note, 
staling it to that stock subject of pulpiteers, 
how good it is to be good. One of the most pal- 
pable endeavors of his whole poetic career is to 
keep his thought in the note of pure poetry, and 
eliminate the didactic and dialectic. We have 
observed with what delicate reticence he ex- 
punged even so slight a didactic suggestion as is 
conveyed by that sub-title "the true and the 
false," as between Enid and Nimue, and how 
when he published the Idylls he left his readers 
to find this out for themselves. One notes the 
same careful avoidance in such a portrayal as 
The Vision of Sin, where a preacher's plea is 
embodied in terms of pure spiritual descrip- 
tion. A still more striking instance appears in 
his first long poem. The Princess ; which was 
concerned, of all things in the world, with the 
subject of woman's education. The composition 
of this poem seems to reveal, so to say, his 
laboratory, wherein he was working out the 

77 
LOFC 



anb ttje 



Jn iDcmorlam 
Itppvi, 2 



IJerbcTt, Xlfe 
Cljurcl? "porcl? 



problem how to convey a vital philosophic truth 
to the heart ; and we are aware through what 
a "strange diagonal" of form and plot, and with 
what prentice ear-marks, he managed, or at 
least conscientiously tried, to convey an essen- 
tially prosaic theme poetically. 

How then shall this epic theme, well-nigh as 
prosaic as the other, be made viable, in an 
age that so sorely needs its wisdom and vital 
thrust? Tennyson had struck the note by which 
he became " England's voice for half a century," 
and to him the trust was sacred. If, as he re- 
cognizes, 

"truth embodied in a tale 
Shall enter in at lowly doors," 

and if, in George Herbert's words, 

**A verse may find him, who a Sermon flies, 
And turn delight into a Sacrifice," 

then his artistic way is marked out for him in 
the free play of his poetic nature. By the way 
of charming tale, by the way of captivating con- 
ciliating verse, from the poet whom they have 
come to idolize, his listeners shall be found and 
sweetly led. If in poetry they have become a 
race of lotos eaters, lotos they shall have. And 
so the theme of ideal manhood with its c ^nser- 
vation of law and order, is laid upon them not 
trenchantly and exactingly, but as a reverbe- 
rating music, an enveloping atmosphere, a per- 
vading tone of things, an imaginative world 
ordered and proportioned. One feels the influ- 
ence as soon as one enters ; it is all around him, 
streaming in the breeze, pulsating in season and 
weather. His very senses advise him whether, 
78 



as in Gareth and Lynette, he is moving where fC^e 3lbpfftf 
the youthful standards of life are tonic and true, mij) ifj^ 
or, as in Merlin and Vivien, the hot midsummer jr^^tf 
air is charged with thunder and cynic lust, or, 
as in The Last Tournament, he is moving 
through an autumn season of falseness and 
decaying vows and moral rottenness. Thus the 
consummate art of the cycle labors untiringly 
in the interest of such a sweet unspoken power 
as for a time wrought on Sir Balin, and but 
for the subtle encroachments of baser sense 
might to the end have wrought on all the Table 

Round: 

"and all the world 
Made music, and he felt his being move 6A\in and 

In music with his Order and the King. " *alaii, 206 

How Otherwise, we ask as we have already 
asked, could such a theme, so austere because 
so high, have been made a commanding and 
restraining power on the mind of a too heed- 
less and drifting generation? 

But new times are upon us, new issues, new 
emphasis of things; so that the last-century 
epic, so fitted to its day, comes to us not unlike 

"That story which the bold Sir Bedivere . . . 
Told, when the man was no more than a voice 
In the white winter of his age, to those ^»?< t^*««<»»0 of 

With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds." «rtl?ur, 1 

Does the music of it still carry and reverberate 
as of old? Are the values that we have found 
permanent values? 

As for the theme, with its moral upshot of 
duty, its plea for the eternal sacredness of love 
and law, its tender unveiling of the spiritual 

79 



anb t^c 
Jlg;e6 



iDalorf , tOorte 
JD'flrtljur, |:^i. 7 



:6aret1? and 
CrnettCf 271 



perils with which society so heedlessly plays, 
it can no more die than can Arthur. It stands 
there majestic, like God's awful rose of dawn; 
and though it may long be unheeded or eclipsed, 
in men's chase after the new fancy of the hour, 
yet the onset of chastisement and conscience, 
which is due to visit every generation, when like 
Guinevere men wake to the wisdom of things 
as they are designed in heaven, will reveal its 
pure severity of perfect light. Malory's epitaph 
of Arthur, 

**Hic jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futurus," 

is the announcement not of death but of resur- 
rection, or rather of perpetuity; and with Ar- 
thur comes again, for us, all that Tennyson has 
so nobly made Arthurmean. Thekingcan never 
again be to the world what he was before our 
poet saw in him ideal manhood closed in real man 
and made him the conscience of an imperilled 
social order. Nor, we may be confident, can the 
music of this characteristic modern epic die 
into oblivion, its consummate art going for no- 
thing, any more than can the music of Spenser 
and Milton. Men will return to it again and 
again from their newer vog^ues, as to a sym- 
phony of Beethoven, as to a time-hallowed cho- 
ral song ; will bathe wearied nerves and tastes 
anew in it, as it were in the warmth and beauty 
of the eternal prophecy, the city yet to be: 

**For an ye heard a music, like enow 
They are building still, seeing the city is built 
To music, therefore never built at all. 
And therefore built for ever." 



80 



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